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PROCEEDINGS 



:OF the:- 



CoLLKGE Section 



— OF THE — 



ILLINOIS 

STATE TEACHERS' ASSOCIATION, 



SPRINGFIELD. 

December 27 and 28, 1888. 



UNIVERSITY PRESS CO., EVaNSTOn, IlL. 



Single copies of this pamphlet will be sent 
postpaid for twenty-five cents. Address 
UNIVERSITY PRESS CO., 

EVANSTON, Ihh. 



PROCEEDINGS 



■:oF the:- 



COLLKGB SbCTION 



— OF TH^ 



ILLINOIS 

STATE TEACHERSl/VSSOCIATION. 



SPRINGFIELD. 
December 27 and 28, 1888. 



VNIVERSITY PRES^ CO. EVANSTON iLt 



v'^"^^ 



m fMNAMtC 



JUN 1 1 wft 



Contents. 



J 



CONTENTS. 

PAGK. 

Constitution 3 

Record of Proceedings 4 

Address by the President, Selim H. Peabody, Pti. D., LIv- D., Regent 

of the University of JJlijaqis. 9 

Paper by Joseph R. Harker, Principal of Whipple Academy, Jackson- 
ville : "What are we Doing in this State to Prepare Pupils for 
College?" .....;........:..,...,.... 14 

Paper by H. A. Fischer* A. M., Professor of Mathematics in Wheaton 

College: " Uniform Courses in Colleges." 25 

Paper by Rev. H. F. Fisk, D. D., Professor of Pedagogics, Northwest- 
ern University : " How can our School Programmes be Short- 
ened and Enriched? " 34 

Paper by Rev. J. B. McMichael, D, D., President of Monmouth Col- 
lege : "Limitation of State Provision for Education." ; 51 

Paper by Rev. W. C. Roberts, D. D., LL. D., President of Lake Forest 

University : " Education." 61 

Paper by Rev. Nathaniel Butler, Jr., A. M., Professor of Latin, Univer- 
sity of Illinois : " Purposes of the Study of Latin." 76 

Paper by Rev. E. A. Tanner, D. D., President of Illinois College, Jack- 
sonville : ' ' The College Phase of the New Education . " 92 



Proceedings of the Coi.i.ege Section. 



CONSTITUTION. 

ARTICLE I. 
This association shall be called the College Section of the Illinois State 
Teachers' Association. 

ARTICIvK II. 
All instructors of the universities, colleges, and seminaries of the State 
of Illinois shall be entitled to membership in this association, provided that 
they are members of the State Teachers' Association. 

ARTICLE III. 
The officers of the College Section shall consist ot a President, Vice- 
President, Secretary, and an Executive Committee of three, who shall be 
elected by ballot at each annual meeting. 

ARTICLE IV. 
It shall be the duty of the Executive Committee to make all necessary 
arrangements for the meetings of the College Section, including pro- 
gramme, papers, and topics for discussion. 



Prockejdings of thk C01.1.KGK Skction. 



PROCEEDINGS. 

FIRST AKNUAI, MEETING, Dkckmbi:r 28, 1887. 

MORNING SESSION. 

Twenty-one members of college faculties of the State of Illinois met 
pursuant to call at ten o'clock in the Supreme Court Room of the Capitol 
at Springfield, December 28, 1887. 

The meeting was called to order by Professor J. C. Hutchison, of Mon- 
mouth College. Professor G. R. Cutting, of Lake Forest University, was 
appointed Temporary Secretary. 

The committee appointed at Chicago last Summer on organization of a 
College Section — Professor J. C. Hutchison, of Monmouth College ; Presi- 
dent B. A. Tanner, of Illinois College, and Professor D. A. Straw, ofWiieaton 
College, — presented a report recommending an organization and propos- 
ing a constitution. 

Moved by President E- A. Tanner, of Illinois College, that such an 
association as that proposed by the committee be formed. Carried. 

Regent S. H. Peabody, of the State University, Professor h- F. Griffin, 
of Lake Forest University, and Professor R. Nutting, of Blackburn Uni- 
versity, were appointed a committee to confer with the Executive Committee 
of the Illinois State Teachers' Association relative to the formation of this 
body as a section of the State Association. 

The Section then listened to a paper by Professor E. F. Reid, of Mon- 
mouth College, on "Some defects in Our Colleges and the Means of Their 
Removal." A copy was requested for publication. 

Adjourned till 3 P. M. 

AFTERNOON SESSION. 

College Section met at 3 P. M. Minutes approved. 

Regent S. H. Peabody, of the Committee on Conference, reported that 
a resolution would be introduced into the State Association favoring the in- 
troduction of the College Section into the State Association. 

The constitution, as found on page 4, was read, considered, and unani- 
mously adopted. 



6 PROCE^BDINGS OF THK CoivI^EGK SECTION. 

The following were appointed a Committee on Nominations : President 
M, D. Hornbeck, of Chaddock College ; Professor J. W. Jenks, of Knox 
College, and Professor R. Nutting, of Blackburn University. 

This committee reported a list of officers as follows : President, S. H. 
Peabody, Ih-Iv. D., Regent of University of Illinois; Vice President, Rev. E. 
A. Tanner, D, D., President of Illinois College ; Secretary, Professor G. R. 
Cutting, of I^ake Forest University ; Executive Committee — Professor J. C. 
Hutchison, of Monmouth College ; Professor Robert D. Sheppard, D. D., of 
Northwestern University, and Professor G. R. Cutting, of I^ake Forest Uni- 
versity. The above were elected by ballot. 

A paper was then read by President Charles A. Blanchard, of Wheaton 
College, on the "Relation of the College to the Common School." It was 
voted to request its publication. A discussion followed. 

Adjourned to meet in joint session with the State Association, sub- 
ject to call of the Executive Committee. 

G. R. CUTTING, Secretary. 



Procekdings of the CoivIvKgh Section. 



SECOND ANNUAI, MEETING. 
FIRST SESSION, December 27, 1888. 

The College Section was called to order by President S. H. Peabody at 
2:30 P. M. 

Prayer was offered by Dr. E. Iv. Hurd, of Blackburn University. 

An opening address was delivered by President S. H. Peabody. (See 
page 9.) 

Principal J. R. Harker, of Jacksonville, read a paper on "What are 
we Doing in this State to Prepare Pupils for College ? " (See page 14.) 

Professor H. A. Fischer, of Wheaton, read a paper on " Uniform Courses 
in Colleges." (See page 25.) 

After discussion a committee was appointed to consider all matters pro- 
posed in this paper and report next year, as follows : Regent S H. Peabody 
of the State University, President W. C. Roberts, of Lake Forest Univer- 
sity, President E. L. Hurd, of Blackburn University, President E. A. Tan- 
ner, of Illinois College, and Professor H. A. Fischer, of Wheaton College. 

Professor H. F. Fisk, of Northwestern University, read a paper, 
"How can our School Programmes be Shortened and Enriched?" (See 
page 34.) Discussion followed. 

Professor J. C. Hutchison then read a paper prepared by Rev. J. B. 
McMichael, D. D., President of Monmouth College. (See page 51.) 

The foUov/ing committees were appointed : Nominations — Professor 
George Churchill, of Knox College ; Professor Levi Seeley, of Lake Forest 
University, and Professor D. A. Straw, of Wheaton College ; Publication 
of Papers — Professor G. R. Cutting, of Lake Forest University ; Prof- 
essor J. C: Hutchison, of Monmouth College, and Professor Holmes Dys- 
inger, of Carthage College. 

Adjourned till 2 P. M. Friday. 

G. R. CUTTING, Secretary. 



Prockkdings of thk C01.1.KGK Skction. 



SECOND SESSION, December 28, 1888. 

The College Section was called to order by President S. H. Peabody, at 
2.30 p. m. 

Prayer was offered by President E- A. Tanner, of Illinois College. 

The Committee on Publication made a report favoring the printing of 
the transactions of the College Section. 

The publication of the transactions and papers of the College Section 
was referred to the Executive Committee for 1889 with authority to publish 
if they can provide fo^ the expense. 

A paper on " Education " was next presented by President W. C. Rob- 
erts, of Lake Forest University. (See page 61.) 

Rev. Nathaniel Butler, Jr., A. M., Professor of Latin in the Illinois Uni- 
versity, read a paper on " Purposes of the Study of Latin." (See page 76.) 

President E- A. Tanner, of Illinois College, presented a paper on " The 
College Phase of the New Education. " (See page 92.) 

EHsha Gray, LL. D., of Highland Park, next delivered an address on 
"The Telautograph." A vote of thanks was tendered to Professor Gray 
for his address. 

The Committee on Nominations proposed the following officers for 1889, 
and they were elected by ballot: President, W. C. Roberts, President of 
Lake Forest University ; Vice-President, J. B. McMichael, President of 
Monmouth College ; Secretary, J. R. Harker, Illinois College ; Executive 
Committee — D. A. Straw, Wheaton College ; H. F. Fisk, Northwestern 
University; and J. R. Harker, Illinois College. 

Adjourned. 

G. R. CUTTING, Secretary. 



Address of Dr. Skum H. Peabody. 



ADDRESS. 

•BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE SECTION, SEI.IM H. PEABODY, I.I.. D., RECENT 
OF THE UNIVERSITY OF II.I.INOIS, CHAMPAIGN. 

^^entlemen of the College Section : 

For a term of years the sessions of the College Section of 
the State Teachers' Association of Illinois have been suspended. 
Whether this suspension was caused by any lack of interest on 
the part of the Section itself, or whether it happened because all 
•division of the Association into sections was for a time abandoned, 
does not appear, and is probably of little consequence to us. It 
is certainly a reason for congratulation that the college men of 
the State have deemed it wise to resuscitate some form of organi- 
zation, in which they may renew or form acquaintances, may join 
in friendly discussion of questions vital to their common work, 
and may give some fresh impetus to the grand and inspiring cause 
of higher education in Illinois and in the United States. I believe 
it also to be wise that this organization has taken pains to affiliate 
itself with the State Association, and to become an integral part 
thereof, rather than to stand aloof as a separate body. The edu- 
cational interests of this land and of this State are, and they ought 
to be, so thoroughly in harmony, so inextricably and indissolubly 
interwoven as to unite all thought, all aspiration, all effort, in a 
common cause — and that cause is the advancement of the human 
race. As the several arms of military warfare have their proper 
services in each grand army, infantry, cavalry, artillery, and engi- 
neers, all aiding all, and each contending after his fashion in a 
thoroughly organized and united movement against a common 
enemy, so are the different departments, primary, secondary, and 



10 ProCKEDINGS of THK C01.I.EGK SECTION. 

higher, including seminary and college, technical, and profes. 
sional schools, but the different arms of the Grand Educational 
Army of the Republic. Their only rivalry should be the 
generous rivalry which strives to excel in doing the greatest good. 
I find in the latest report of the State Superintendent of Pub- 
lic Instruction a list of educational institutions in Illinois incor-^ 
porated by law, numbering ninety-seven. Of these, reports were 
made by only fifty -seven. Of these, there appear to be : 

Professional and reformatory 10 

Academies 12 

Seminaries for women 13 

Colleges for men, or for both sexes 22 — 57 

It is probable that these are not exactly classified. 

The latest report of the United States Commissioner of Bdu- 
catiori names twenty-five colleges, of which only eighteen are re- 
ported as conferring degrees at the commencements of 1886. The 
population of the State is about that of the United States at the 
close of the revolutionary war. The number of colleges now ex- 
isting in the United States which were in existence at the close of 
that war is twelve; at the end of the last century, twenty-one. 
The ratio of colleges in this State now, and of the United States- 
at the periods referred to, is not very different. 
For the year ending at Commencement, 1886 : 

The number of college instructors was 233 

Instructors in preparatory classes connected with col- 
leges 46 — 279 

The number of collegiate students was 1,629 

The number of preparatory, professional, and other..... 3,028 — 4,657 

The same report gives for the higher education of women :: 

Number of schools 9 

Number of instructors , 108 , 

Number of students 973, 



Address OF Dr. Ski.im H. Peabody. h 

The ratio of college students to population in the Northern 
Central States, including the area north of the Ohio River, and 
of the south line of Missouri and Kansas, is given at i : 1,273; 
but the ratio of college students in the State of Illinois for the 
year named, taking the population at 3,200,000 (3,180,354), will 
be I : 1,903. Applying the ratio first given, it would appear that 
about twenty- five hundred (2,514) Illinois students are somewhere 
in college, unless we admit, which we shall hardly be prepared to 
admit, that Illinois is furnishing fewer students for higher educa- 
tion than are her immediate neighbors. The neighboring States 
do not excel Illinois in any other signs of material prosperity, or 
intellectual advancement, and are not likely to excel her in this 
particular. It appears, then, that, while there are 1,630 students 
in Illinois colleges, about nine hundred Illinois students are some- 
where else at college, or that only about two -thirds of the college^ 
students of the State are in their own schools. Of course, it is, 
not possible in a matter like this to be exact, but other estimates, 
of the same subject have led to the conclusion that fully one- third 
of our students go out of the State for their college education. 
An inspection of the catalogues of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cor- 
nell, the University of Michigan, and the Institute of Technology- 
shows in each one a very considerable number of Illinois students, 
and this, too, in spite of the fact that the student who goes abroad 
incurs large cost for travel, tuition fees from two to ten times what 
he would pay at home, and expenses of living from two to four- 
fold his expenses at home. 

There are reasons for all this. • 

First, the Eastern schools have in most instances the prestige 
of age. Their alumni are scattered all through our society, and 
the rule is that a college alumnus sends his boy where he himself 
graduated, if he can spare the money to do so. 

Secondly, the Eastern schools have in numerous instances 
the prestige of large, and in some cases of magnificent, endow- 



12 Procekdings of the CoIvIvKgk Section. 

meuts ; and endowments mean the power of increasing facilities 
of instruction, of securing the best talent, by both which means 
brilliant inducements to students who can meet the cost are 
offered. The institutions are not to be blamed for their past. It 
is their business to grow as fast and to become as powerful as they 
can. The students are not to ^be blamed. If I were a student 
planning to spend four years of the hey-dey of my life in college, 
with what of money would be needful for my support and instruc- 
tion, I would get the very best that my money would buy, whether 
at home or away from home would not signify, and I should very 
likely be attracted by the glint of grand endowments and renowned 
instructors and magnificent equipments. 

And when I meet an ingenuous youth, whose face, like the 
lad's in the second picture of Cole's Voyage of I^ife, is fixed in- 
tently on the glorious phantom resplendent in the eastern sky, I 
say to him : ' ' Choose now distinctly what you wish to do — what 
kmd of an education you seek to secure, and then find where you 
can get that the best. But before you finally decide, think how 
much of the result depends on yourself, how much more depends 
on yourself than upon your surroundings, and judge whether, 
after all, you may not really make the best of yourself under con- 
ditions less exacting and more in keeping with your means." I 
still rejoice that here in Illinois are open a goodly number of in- 
stitutions, whence flow abundant founts of sound learning, at 
whose brim the earnest, ingenuous youth may drink his fill, even 
though poverty be his heritage and hard toil the cost of his daily 
bread.* Many a poor boy struggled through his college life in New 
England forty years ago who would find to-day the odds too great 
to be borne. 

My brethren of the College Guild, there is no doubt that in 
our efforts to found colleges here in the West that^shall be, when 
they are as old, what the Eastern colleges have come to be, we are 
striving against great odds. But there is need here for us, all of 



Addrkss qf Dr. SkIvIM H. Pkabody. 13 

us, and more. This broad, rich, grand prairie State, the Empire 
State of the central land, with its teeming population, its grand 
position, its exuberant wealth, has need for all the culture, all the 
science, all the refinement, all the discipline, that can be developed 
by the cordial, combined, and efiScient labors of the faithful labor- 
ers who are giving the best efforts of their lives to found and per- 
petuate colleges in her midst. 

Bach of us, in his own view, is poor. What is poverty but 
the lack of means to satisfy our wants ? Our poverty consists in 
this, that we discover so many and so important and so useful 
purposes ready for our efforts if we had but the means to accom- 
plish them. Dr. Angell once said to me that the normal condition 
of every active educational institution is to be in want, and that 
Michigan University was too poor to fulfill her mission. 

There remains to us our work. Which, elsewhere, is the 
earnest performance of our duties towards our students, the pub- 
lic, and sound learning ; and here, to discuss, with I am sure the 
kindest harmony, questions of importance to our common weal. 



14 Proceedings of the Coli<ege Section. 



WHAT ARE WE DOING IN ILLINOIS TO 

PREPARE STUDENTS FOR 

COLLEGE? 

BY JOSEPH R. HARKKR, PRINCIPAL OP WHIPPLE ACADEMY, JACKSONVILLE, 

ILLINOIS. 

In order to secure definite information on the subject of this 
paper, I sent circulars of inquiry to the colleges, academies, and 
high schools of the state. The colleges were requested to ana- 
lyze their Freshman classes of the present year, with a view to 
ascertain where the students received their preparation for college. 
The academies and high schools were asked to report the extent 
of their courses of study, and the number of their graduates that 
have gone to college in the past four years. I am under obliga- 
tions to ii colleges, II academies, and 83 high schools; and 
personally thank all my correspondents for their promptness and 
courtesy. Many of them not only gave the information wanted 
in the way of statistics, but also freely expressed their views on 
the general subject of preparation for college, so that I am able 
in this paper to present, in the way of suggestion, the views of 
many besides myself. 

Comparing the reports from the colleges, we find that most 
of our college students are prepared by the colleges themselves. 
Ewing College prepared all its Freshman class ; Illinois 
College, about 90 per cent.; Illinois Wesleyan, 75 per cent.; 
Knox and lyake Forest have recently made changes 
in their requirements, so that no definite figures could be given, 
but the percentage is high ; Northwestern University, 50 per cent.; 
University of Illinois,[not definij:ely stated, but I judge from the 
report about 40 per cent. It is safe to conclude that on the aver- 



Preparation eor CoIvI.kgk. 15 

age 75 per cent, of our college students are prepared by the col- 
leges themselves in their preparatory classes. 

Of the remaining 25 per cent., a careful study of the reports 
£:om colleges and high schools seems to show that 20 per cent, 
come from the high schools, and about 5 per cent, from acade- 
mies and seminaries not connected with the colleges. 

This general summary of the reports received will serve as a 
l)asis for a few observations. 

I. Practically all that we are doing in Illinois to prepare 
:students for college is done by the colleges themselves. 

Colleges were founded early in the history of our state by 
'earnest men and women who believed that in the beginnings of 
colonization an opportunity should be given for the complete de- 
velopment of the faculties of man, and that the foundations of 
stable governments could be laid only in liberal learning and in 
Christian character. They laid the foundations of the higher ed- 
ucation wisely, and with unfaltering faith and unflinching devo- 
tion they and their successors have builded thereupon, so that to- 
'day we have a number of institutions of higher learning of which 
any state may justly be proud. But it has been an arduous ta£k 
to accomplish this result. The friends of the colleges have had 
not only to carry on college work, to secure endowments and 
■funds for that work, but also to provide their own materials. Like 
the Israelites in Egypt, they have not only made brick, but they 
have been obliged to gather their own straw. There is not a col- 
lege in the state that has found it possible to carry on its own 
work without the aid of a preparatory department to provide col- 
lege material. In almost every instance the number of students 
in this preparatory department is greater than the number in the 
college courses. The time and strength of the professors have been 
divided, and in many cases by far the greater part of their work 
has been to give secondary instruction. They have not taken up 
this kind of work from choice, but from necessity'. It has been 
impossible to secure students already prepared. 



1 6 Procekdings of the; Coi.i.e)gk Section. 

The colleges have constantly protested against this necessity. 
As early as 1838, the trustees of the Illinois College at Jackson- 
ville adopted a resolution to dispense with the preparatory depart- 
ment. But they soon found themselves compelled to take up the 
work again. So also with other colleges. They have limited the 
time given to preparatory work as much as possible, making it 
only one year, and trying to crowd the necessary preparation 
within that limit ; but they have found this in most cases alto- 
gether inadequate, and have been forced to arrange for complete 
courses of secondary instruction. The State University, perhaps 
more than any other institution, has endeavored to secure students 
without arranging a preparatory class. Its natural position, as 
the head of the state system of public schools, gives it exceptional 
advantages in this respect. But it is compelled, year by year, in 
spite of its constant protests, to maintain such a class, and to pre- 
pare a large percentage of its own students. 

I think there is not a college faculty in the state who would 
not hail with delight the day when they could receive their stu- 
dents already prepared for college work. 

But in the past, and to a large extent in the present, these 
preparatory departments of the colleges have been and are, as far 
as design goes, the only nurseries for higher education in the 
state. They make preparation for college their main work ; the 
student in them is surrounded by influences tending strongly 
towards a college course; the teachers in these departments go out 
among the people as apostles of the higher education; and it does 
not take a long experience to teach any man who thus goes out 
among the people of the state that the colleges themselves, aided 
by their own preparatory departments, are almost the only forces 
aiming in this direction. That a college sentiment is growing, 
and, I believe, growing rapidly, is due, first, to their earnest per- 
sistence ; secondly, to the fact that the public school men are be- 
ginning to aid in this work; and, thirdly, to the fact that in spite; 



Preparation for Coi^IvKGE. 17 

of Senator Ingalls the people are beginning to see that higher ed- 
ucation does bring higher success in every department of life. 

It is true also that hitherto the colleges have worked sepa- 
rately, and very little in combination. They have worked apart, 
each in his own section. That so much has been accomplished 
single-handed gives us great hope that, now. a union has been ef- 
fected, the growth of college spirit and of a belief in the utility of 
college education will be greatly quickened. 

2. What of the high schools in this matter of college educa- 
tion ? 

As has l:)een said, about 20 per centv of the college students 
in the state enter directly from high schools. There are 169 
high schools in the state, 5 of them reporting a five-years' 
course of study ; 70 a four years' course; and 94 a three years' 
course. They claim, as a rule, to require for entrance a fair 
knowledge of the common branches, the completion of the gram- 
mar grade work in the lower schools. I^ast year they graduated 
1962 pupils. Of this number comparatively few attend college. 
Why? 

Several reasons are given by my correspondents. One is 
that those who expect to go to college do not remain in the high 
school, but leave early to enter the preparatory department of 
whatever college they wish to attend. 

Another is that most of the graduates are girls, and that, 
whether boys or girls, they have given as much time to education 
as they can afford, and must now begin life in some practical 
way. 

Another is that the pupils find on graduation that they are 
not ready to enter college, and refuse to spend more time in prep- 
aration. 

These reasons all have force, and require our attention ; but 
the main reason, to my mind, is in the popular conception of what 
the high school is. The general idea of the public, of teachers, 



1 8 Procekdings of the CoIvI^kge Section. 

•of high vSchool principals themselves, is, that the high schools 
are designed, not to prepare for a still higher education, but to 
complete the education of their students. Our high schools are 
a development of the lower common schools, and are independent 
of the colleges both in origin and design. The object of the 
common school has always been held to be preparation for practi- 
cal life. The common schools originated in the necessities of the 
common people, and have developed with them. At first the 
course of instruction was very limited, embracing only reading, 
spelling, writing, and arithmetic ; and little even of these. But 
as population and wealth increased, the course of study was en- 
larged, expanding to include the seven common branches, so- 
called, then adding algebra, geometry, the sciences, languages, 
then music, drawing, and so on, ad libitum. But with all the 
changes in development the purpose has not changed. When only 
the " three r's " were taught, and little even of these, the pupil 
was prepared for practical life ; and now, at the end of the high 
school course, he reaches the same result. 

The whole atmosphere of the high school tends to make the 
student satisfied with himself at graduation. Its course of study 
is arranged with the express purpose of fitting him for citizenship; 
and when he leaves the school, he leaves it feeling that now he is 
prepared for all life's duties ; that a collegiate education may be a 
good thing, a luxury for those that can afiord it, and that want 
it ; but altogether unnecessary for practical life. The high school 
course is designed to finish the education of the pupil, and the 
teaching is done with that design in view. One principal says : 
'* High school courses should be arranged on the idea that the 
school life ends there." Another says, '*I consider the high 
school to be the top layer in our educational system." Another, 
" High schools should not be feeders to colleges, so few expect 
to go." 

Such a conception of education is belittling to our profession. 



Prkparation for C01.1.KGE;. 19 

^o call any system of education complete short of the higher 
education smacks of demagoguery. In the history of our state 
the time has been when the poverty of the common people greatly 
limited their opportunities of education ; but the common people 
are all the people, and the proper conception of education for the 
people is, " Nothing short of the highest, unless necessity com^ 
pels." If a boy must stop at the end of the primary grade, he 
must ; but let us not arrange for stopping there ; let us encourage 
iim, and fit him, to go forward. If he must stop at the end of the 
grammar grade, he must ; but let us not arrange for stopping there; 
let us encourage him, and fit him, to go forward. And in like 
manner, if a youth's education must end in the high school, we 
cannot avoid it ; but let us not deceive him by telling him he does 
not need more ; let us recognize and sympathize with his neces- 
sity, but let us so arrange the work that he will be encouraged, if 
opportunity offers, to go still higher. 

The greatest educational need of Illinois to-day is a change 
of public opinion in regard to the utility of the higher education. 
This change must begin among the teachers of the public schools, 
and especially among the high school principals and teachers. I 
am glad to believe that such a change is now taking place, and 
thatfthe sentiment is growing among high school men that the 
affiliations of the high school with the college should be more 
intimate. 

Hitherto the relation between high schools and colleges has 
not been antagonistic — it has been merely indifferent. College 
teachers, as a class, are the product of the colleges ; high school 
teachers^are the product of the public schools. The work of each 
class has been of an entirely different character, and they have 
not been brought together in any intimate way for the discussion 
of common educational questions. There has been a feeling, 
more or less vague, shared by both, that the public schools and 
the colleges exist for different purposes ; that they have little in 



20 Procsbdings of the Coi.i.kge^ Section. 

common educationally ; that the public schools exist for practical, 
everyday life, for the poor, for the * ' people ' ' ; and that the col- 
leges exist for learned leisure, for the rich, for those above the 
people. 

Separated thus in training, in methods of work, in aim, it is 
no wonder that they have been indifferent to each other. It ought 
to be said here in this College Section that for this relation of in- 
difference the college men are mostly to blame. Their position 
at the higher end of the educational field gave them an outlook 
commanding the whole system ; and they ought to have seen 
sooner that their highest success is possible only by the highest 
development of elementary and secondary instruction. But in 
some instances, instead of fostering and aiding ^^general primary 
and secondary instruction, they have fought against it ; they have 
been indifferent, and sometimes hostile, to the public school sys- 
tem generally, and to the high school in particular. It is well 
that college men should understand definitely that the public 
school system is a natural product of the American idea of gov- 
ernment, and that the high school is a natural development of 
the public school system, and is here to stay. 

High schools have in a great measure taken the place of the 
old-time academy. College men should see that all their students 
must come from the public schools ; and they ought naturally to 
have taken up the public system with hearty sympathy, and to have 
aided in its development. And their highest interests to-day lie in 
the recognition of the high schools as their proper recruiting 
ground, and in co-operating to make these schools as perfect as 
may be. 

We are just now learning much by a comparison of our sys- 
tem of education with that of Germany, confessing that in many 
respects we are far behind that country. It will be seen at once 
that the most distinctive feature of German schools is that the 
whole system is a unit, and that the primary and secondary 



Preparation for Coli^ege. 21 

courses of study are definitely arranged in the line of their Uni- 
versity work. They have a single system; we have a double sys- 
tem. Our systems have no reference to each other; hardly fitting 
anywhere, in some parts overlapping, in others not reaching each 
other ; and the result is necessarily waste of time, waste of en- 
ergy, and disappointment in results. I believe the time has come 
for a general movement in the direction of uniting the high schools 
and the colleges in one common aim. 

College men should favor such a movement because it will 
relieve them in part from the necessity of preparing nearly all their 
own students ; and because with such an aim before our high 
schools, the belief in the necessity of a college education and the 
desire to attend college would be more general, and a larger num- 
ber would seek admission. 

I believe that high school men would favor such a movement. 
Some of them already urge very warmly that if the courses of 
study in the high schools were made to tend more in the direction 
of college work, the courses would then not only enable more pu- 
pils to go directly to college, but would be a better preparation for 
life than the present courses, even for those who cannot go on. 
Mr. Harvey, of Pittsfield, advocated this view in an able paper 
read last spring before the Central Illinois Teachers' Association 
at Galesburg, and many high school men there present agreed 
with him. Many of my correspondents express the same view. 

It would require very little change in the present high school 
courses. Of the eighty-three high schools on my list, twelve have 
courses of study including two years or more of Greek and three 
years or more of I^atin, enough to prepare students for the classi- 
cal course in college, if the teacher is aiming in that direction. 
Forty-seven have three years or more of Latin, fifty-nine have two 
years or more of Latin; all have geometry from three to twelve 
months, averaging about eight months; all have algebra from six 
to fourteen months, averaging about ten months; all have higher 



22 Prockkdings of thk Coi.i.e:gk Se:ction. 

English studies, averaging about ten months ; all have element- 
ary science, averaging about twenty months. The onlj^ changes- 
required would be the general recognition that the high school is 
not the end of the educational course, a little trimming of the 
studies here and there, and more definite teaching with a view to 
having the results accepted by college faculties. 

Many high schools are anxious to make these changes, but 
find themselves greatly perplexed by the indefiniteness and want, 
of uniformity of the admission requirements on the part of the col- 
leges. It is next to impossible to prepare for college without hav- 
ing some definite college in mind. One college requires all of both 
plane and solid geometry, another no geometry at all ; one re- 
quires little or no algebra, another a knowledge of quadratics and 
radicals; one is quite strict in admitting students, another is very 
lax. The colleges ought to have definite requirements; there 
ought to be substantial uniformity in our colleges in this respect; 
the requirements ought to conform as far as possible to the possi- 
bilities of the high schools; and the colleges ought to keep the 
high schools acquainted with their standard of requirements for 
admission. 

The State University has done much to bring about such a 
connection as I urge, and is beginning to see some fruit to its la- 
bors. I am informed that the present year has brought it more 
students from high schools than ever before. But the State Uni- 
versity alone should not do this; every college in the State should 
be working earnestly along the same line. 

High school men would be glad of the added incentive such 
an arrangement would be to pupils to finish the high school 
course. Many pupils now leave the high school before gradua- 
tion because the end of the course promises nothing definite. 

I have no fear that such a union in purpose and idea as I 
have urged between colleges and high schools will injure any 
good academy in the state. A good academy will differ from a 



Preparation for Coli^ege. 23. 

good high school not so much in its courses of study as in its 
more definitely religious aim and training. The high schools, be- 
longing to all the people, take their students from all classes, and 
are hindered, as are all state institutions, from any but the most 
general religious influences. An academy, on the other hand, is 
usually founded for definite religious instruction; and while few 
are narrowly sectarian, nearly all are managed with a view to 
making religious training and Christian character fully as promi- 
nent as their literary instruction. Parents who desire such relig- 
ious training and influences will always be found ; and it will be 
true that every advance in the direction of the higher education 
will increase the means and the demand for good academies. There 
are now in Illinois some such academies, doing good work, but 
greatly hindered by public indifference in regard to the higher ed- 
ucation. Owing to this indifference, many of the academies of 
the state are merely business schools, assuming or retaining the 
name for business purposes. They do not make much effort to 
prepare for a higher education. They find that the idea of getting 
what they call a practical education, and preparing for life in a 
few months, is in the air, is on the people, epidemic; and they ar- 
range their courses so as to secure the largest possible patronage. 
I do not find that such academies send as many students to col- 
lege, on the average, as do the high schools. 

These schools and the so-called business colleges are a great in- 
j ury to the higher education. They live on the weakness of the people ; 
they invent arguments, and keep them constantly before the peo- 
ple, to show that it is unnecessary to spend years in securing an 
education. They are largely responsible for the idea that it is now 
possible to educate a boy in much less time than formerly, owi ng 
to improved methods, of which they seem to have a monopoly ; 
and by their unwarranted assumption of the name of college, they 
lower the popular conception of the aim and standard of the 



24 Procekdings of the CoivLEGe Section. 

higher education. A college is a college, in popular estimation ; 
and it would aid greatly in giving clear conceptions of the educa- 
tional system, if we could succeed in keeping the terms academy, 
college and university away from things that have no right to 
such names. 



Uniform Courses in Coi,leges. 25 



UNIFORM COURSES IN COLLEGES. 

BY HERMAN A. FISCHER, A. M., PROFESSOR OF MATHEMATICS AND NAT- 
URAL PHILOSOPHY, WHEATON COLLEGE, WHEATON, ILL. 

Mr. President^ Ladies and Gentlemen: 

A very learned essay is said to have been written on tlie 
theme, "Snakes in Ireland," beginning with the sentence: 
*' There are no snakes in Ireland." This paper might, with 
equal propriety, begin with the sentence: "There are no uniform 
courses in colleges." There is sufficient variety to suit all tastes, 
but there is little or no harmony in the variety. 

In preparing this paper, I consulted the catalogues of 
twenty-nine different colleges and universities, including twenty- 
one from our own State, all that were furnished in answer to my 
request; one from Beloit, just across the line; and the rest from 
the college of New Jersey, Oberlin and Williams Colleges, and 
Michigan, Wisconsin, Yale and Harvard Universities, In these 
catalogues, or calendars, nearly a dozen different courses are 
named, not including the various technical and professional 
courses. There is a classical course (also called ancient classical) 
and a modern classical course; there is a scientific course, a course 
in general science, a Latin scientific, a Greek scientific, and an 
English scientific course, a philosophical course, an Knglish 
course, and so on. 

The list of all the degrees conferred in these twenty-nine insti- 
tutions is as puzzling as it is long. A young man who longs for 
distinction of this kind can, in the course of six or eight years, 
accumulate a string of initials to append to his name as long as 
the tail of a kite. He can begin with the degree Laureate of En- 



24 Prockkdings of the CoivLKGe Section. 

higher education. A college is a college, in popular estimation ; 
and it would aid greatly in giving clear conceptions of the educa- 
tional system, if we could succeed in keeping the terms academy, 
college and university away from things that have no right to 
such names. 



Uniform Courses in Coi^leges. 25 



UNIFORM COURSES IN COLLEGES. 

BY HERMAN A. FISCHER, A. M., PROFESSOR OF MATHEMATICS AND NAT- 
URAL PHILOSOPHY, WHEATON COLLEGE, WHEATON, ILL. 

Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen: 

A very learned essay is said to have been written on the 
theme, "Snakes in Ireland," beginning with the sentence: 
" There are no snakes in Ireland." This paper might, with 
equal propriety, begin with the sentence: "There are no uniform 
courses in colleges." There is sufficient variety to suit all tastes, 
but there is little or no harmony in the variety. 

In preparing this paper, I consulted the catalogues of 
twenty -nine different colleges and universities, including twenty- 
one from our own State, all that were furnished in answer to my 
request; one from Beloit, just across the line; and the rest from 
the college of New Jersey, Oberlin and Williams Colleges, and 
Michigan, Wisconsin, Yale and Harvard Universities. In these 
catalogues, or calendars, nearly a dozen different courses are 
named, not including the various technical and professional 
courses. There is a classical course (also called ancient classical) 
and a modern classical course; there is a scientific course, a course 
in general science, a lyatin scientific, a Greek scientific, and an 
English scientific course, a philosophical course, an English 
course, and so on. 

The list of all the degrees conferred in these twenty-nine insti- 
tutions is as puzzling as it is long. A young man who longs for 
distinction of this kind can, in the course of six or eight years, 
accumulate a string of initials to append to his name as long as 
the tail of a kite. He can begin with the degree Laureate of En- 



26 PrOCKE^DINGS of THK CoIvIvKGB Se^ction. 

glish literature; then for a few years further study he has the 
choice of twelve different baccalaureate degrees presented to him; 
after a few years of honorable existence he can become a master 
with his choice of six different letters, or syllables, to qualify the 
*' M."; or he may continue his technical studies in one of four lines 
and become an Engineer; finally he may advance to the rank of 
Doctor, either by studying medicine or by getting into the good 
graces of some college board of trustees and having them ''sur- 
prise " him with one or more of four honorary doctorates. 

The American college confers as many as thirty different de- 
grees. As a title factory, there is only one institution that can 
successfully compete with it, and that is the Masonic order with 
its thirty-three degrees and its list of officers, from Master to Most 
Potent Sovereign Grand Commander. 

It is clear that, in order to do justice to our theme in the time 
allotted, we must confine our attention to the college proper, known 
at Harvard simply as the " College," at Yale as the " Academical 
Department " ; at Illinois University as the ' ' College of Literature 
and Science." Our problem is now very much simplified, and 
yet it is complex enough . 

What is a college course? Let us imagine a young man, of av- 
erage intelligence, trying to find an answer to this question. He 
has studied the common school branches until he can pass an ex- 
amination for a second grade certificate, has been advised to take 
a college course, and wants to follow this good advice, as he ought 
to of, course. By some fortunate providence, he steers clear of the 
shoal of the business college, with its plausible motto, ' * Let your 
boys learn what they will practice when they are men," and of the 
so-called Normal School, which promises to teach him in three 
years more than the " old fogy colleges " can in six, and he sets 
sail for the deeper waters of a liberal education. He secures the 
catalogues of all the degree-conferring colleges of this State and 
begins his liberal education by studying them, to find out what a 



Uniform Courses in Coi.i,kgks. 27 

college course is. In doing so he makes a number of interesting 
discoveries, which I will briefly summarize. 

The length of time required for him to complete a college course 
is very uncertain. To be sure, nearly all the colleges group the 
studies of their courses under four years : Freshman, Sophomore, 
Junior and Senior ; but one college will admit him to the Fresh- 
man class with nearly one term's work to spire ; in another course 
he is just ready to enter the Freshman class, and others require of 
him additional preparatory study, varying from two-thirds of a. 
year to three years. 

The Illinois colleges do not offer him the same courses 
and degrees ; several give him " Hobson's choice" of one, while 
others permit him to choose from two, three, or even four literary 
courses- In the main, they confine themselves to the classical. 
and scientific courses. 

There are various scientific courses; viz: The I^atin Scien- 
tific, the Greek Scientific, the English Scientific, and the Scientific. 
Some colleges promise to make him a Bachelor of Science on 
completion of the Scientific course; while others promise him the 
degree Bachelor of Philosophy, on completion of their I^atin 
Scientific course, which is essentially the same. As a rule the 
scientific courses are shorter than the classical; the)^ contain no 
Greek except in one case as an optional, and in another as a part 
of a Greek scientific course; they contain less I^atin than the 
classical, in several cases none at all. All things considered, the 
scientific course is the most uncertain factor in our problem of de- 
termining what a college course is; and Dr. Gulliver might with 
truth repeat what he said some years ago, while President of 
Knox College: "The degree Bachelor of Science informs me 
that the possessor has studied no Greek and but little I^atin, in 
short, that he does not know very much. I sometimes confer it, 
but always with profound pity for the recipient." 

The Degree of Bachelor of Arts is a little better. All col- 



28 Prockkdings of th^ C01.1.KGK Se^ction. 

leges whose catalogues I have examined bestow it. Here, at 
least, is a uniformity. There is at least one snake in this Ire- 
land, but I fear it is about the only one. 

The following table groups the twenty-nine colleges under 
consideration, according to the time required to secure the degree 
Bachelor of Arts, for a student who has passed a satisfactory ex- 
amination in the common school branches, viz: arithmetic, 
grammar, reading, writing, spelling, United States history and 
geography. 

I have thought best to give simply the number and not the 
names, of colleges in each group, but would most earnestly re- 
quest the authorities of Illinois colleges to ascertain by a careful 
study of their classical and preparatory courses where their respect- 
ive institutions fit in this table, and to most of them I would re- 
spectfully suggest the propriety of ' ' coming up higher. ' ' 

Bight colleges outside of Illinois require about 7 years. 

Three colleges in Illinois require about 7 years. 

Three colleges in Illinois require from 6% to 7 years. 

Five colleges in Illinois require from 6 to 6)4. years. 

Nine colleges in Illinois require from 5 to 6 years. 

One college in Illinois requires about 4% years. 
Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen: — I am not inordinately 
proud of this showing made by Illinois colleges. 

The lines of study pursued in the classical courses of our Il- 
linois colleges are largely the same. Klectives are introduced in 
some, but none have as yet come up, or down, to the level of 
Harvard, the oldest of American colleges. 

A study of the requirements for admission and graduation 
enables us to make an inventory of the mental at- 
tainments of a Harvard Bachelor of Arts: He understands 
the English language and is slightly familiar with 
its literature; he has studied algebra through quadratics, 
and plane geometry; he has studied rhetoric and English compo- 
sition, prepared essays on themes assigned and engaged in dispu- 



Uniform Courses in Coi.i.e;gks. 29 

tations; he has listened to one scientific lecture a week during 
the Freshman year, first on chemistry and then on physics; 
he can read easy prose German and French. This is all we know 
positively. In addition he can read easy prose in one ancient 
language, but we do not know whether it is Greek or I^atin; he 
has passed an examination in history, it may be of Greece and 
Rome, or it may be of England and the United States; he has 
also been examined either in elementary astronomy or elementary 
physics. All his other studies have been chosen from a long list 
of electives. We are informed, however, that "students who 
prefer a course like that usually prescribed in colleges can easily 
secure it by a corresponding choice of studies ' ' ; and it is hardly 
necessary to add that students who prefer light work, can easily 
make their choice accordingly and save valuable time for base 
ball and boating. 

I have said enough to show that there is a sad lack of uni- 
formity in college courses, both as to the time required for them, 
and studies prescribed in ihem. Among the causes leading to 
this state of affairs are, probably, the increase of human knowl- 
edge, and the multiplication of denominational colleges. 

As the sum total of human knowledge increases, the amount 
required for a liberal education naturally increases. The 
gentleman who preceded me on the programme kindly fur- 
nished me with a catalogue of Illinois College just fifty years old. 
At that time no natural science was required except physics, and 
no analytical geometry, no calculus and no modern languages. 
In physics the work must have been far less than now; for many 
new inventions and discoveries have been made since then, and a 
man can hardly be considered liberally educated unless he knows 
something of them. Yale started out wit h a college course of 
three years, and probably less was required for admission to it 
than now to the four years' course. The colleges of the country 
have been endeavoring to keep pace with their time; in this march 



30 Proceedings of the C01.1.EGE Section. 

some have fallen behind, others possibly have gone too far. The 
college course has been stretched and stretched, until it was found 
impossible to include everything in it; then electives were re- 
sorted to, or parallel courses laid down. Unfortunately, there has 
not been enough concert of action about this, and the result is as 
has been shown. 

So, too, the multiplication of denominational colleges has had 
its effect. To a certain extent a new college draws on the patronage 
of the older ones, and weakens them; in so far as new patronage is 
created by planting a college in a new community, or under the 
care of a new denomination, it consists often of persons who have 
had very limited preparatory training and are of somewhat ma- 
ture years; the new college is inadequately supplied with teach- 
ers, and yet desires to graduate classes as large as possible and as 
speedily as possible. All these causes combine to shorten the 
original classical course and to create still shorter courses in the 
new colleges, an j unless the older ones follow their example the 
result again is a difference in college courses. 

If these are the causes, what about the remedies ? I would 
not, neither would you, I believe, remove either of these two 
causes, if you could, and what is more to the point, we could not 
if we would. The human mind, ever active, will continue to ex- 
plore new fields of thought; the Newtons of our day, standing 
by the shore with the ocean of knowledge lying unexplored be- 
fore them, will continue to pick up their pebbles of truth, and 
college courses will continue to embody, in part at least, the 
truths thus discovered. 

So also, communities having no college will continue to offer 
inducements to secure one; benevolent Christians who see that 
the word of God is being crowded out of schools supported by 
popular taxation, will continue to offer their means to found 
Christian colleges, where the word may have free course; relig- 
ious denominations will continue to take advantage [of these 



Uniform Courses in Coi.i.kgks. 31 

oflfers and establish their first or their fiftieth college; young 
men and women living near these new colleges will be drawn 
into them and will desire " to go through college," and I, for one, 
am thankful that the opportunities for gaining a higher educa- 
tion are constantly becoming more abundant. 

No! the causes of the diversity in college courses must not, 
can not be removed; but a remedy must be found or our degrees 
will become valueless. Already, as keen an observer as Leonard 
W. Bacon, D. D., declares that " A. B." is as meaningless an abbre- 
viation as exists, with the exception of '' D. D.," which latter com- 
bination, even Bismarck, the iron Chancellor, is now authorized 
to affix to his awe-inspiring name. 

Permit me to suggest a few measures which this association, 
or section, might take, to produce some degree of uniformity in 
our courses. 

1 . The adoption of a resolution to be submitted to all the 
colleges of the State, recommending that their courses be brought 
to a uniform standard, as to the time required to prepare for, and 
complete them. It may be objected that this would abolish so- 
called shorter courses, and deprive many of the privilege of get- 
ting a college degree, who can now secure one. Granted; but 
thousands have been able to live usefully and die happy without 
owning a parchment diploma adorned with a blue ribbon and 
stamped with a college seal, and, humiliating as the confession 
may be, we might as well admit that this is still possible. Be- 
sides, would it not be better that a hundred persons should ob- 
tain a degree that means, at least, a definite amount of literary 
work performed, than that two hundred should obtain one which 
has no ascertainable meaning ? 

2. I would suggest the appointment of a committee to pre- 
pare and submit to the colleges (a) a list of prescribed studies for 
admission to, and completion of their courses, these pre- 
scribed studies to occupy about two-thirds of the time allotted to 



32 Procejejdings of the CoIvIvEGE Section. 

the courses; {b) a list of electives from which the remaining third 
of the work may be chosen, either by the college authorities as 
prescribed studies or by the students under the supervision of the 
Faculty as electives. 

This plan, so far as carried out, would establish a standard of 
amount of work required for a degree; would also fix two- thirds 
of the studies to be pursued, and yet would have sufficient elas- 
ticity to accommodate itself to the varying needs and notions of 
the colleges in different communities. 

3. I would suggest that the colleges having thus adopted a 
uniform standard of requirement for admission, as well as grad- 
uation, appoint a joint committee on accredited high schools and 
academies. The University of Illinois already has a list of high 
schools whose graduates can be admitted without examination. 
Would not the fact that an accredited high school could have its 
graduates admitted to a dozen, or twenty, colleges in the State, 
do much toward establishing that helpful relation between the 
colleges and secondary schools, which is so desirable? 

As it is at present, we can not expect the high schools to do 
much toward preparing their students for college, simply because 
it is impossible for them to find out what preparation the colleges 
desire. 

I have purposely confined myself mainly to Illinois colleges, 
because this association can hardly hope to influence directly the 
300 or more colleges of the country. An effort has been made in 
the college section of the National Educational Association to 
bring some order out of the confusion now existing; but that 
body is too unwieldy, and too peripatetic, to accomplish much. 
Committees are appointed but do not get together; reports are 
read to be acted on at a subsequent meeting, but the subsequent 
meeting is several thousand miles away, and the report is lost ' ' in 
transit. ' ' 

The colleges of Illinois are near enough together to touch 



Uniform Courses in Coiyi^EOES. 33 

elbows; members of committees from any part of the State can 
meet in Chicago, with comparatively little difficulty. 

I, therefore, sincerely hope that this meeting will not adjourn 
without making an effort, at least, to secure uniform courses in 
the colleges of this State. 



34 Proceedings op the Coi:,i,ege Section. 



HOW CAN SCHOOL PROGRAMMES BE 
SHORTENED AND ENRICHED? 

BY RE;v. HERBERT F. EISK, D. D., PROFESSOR OF PEDAGOGICS, 
NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY, EVANSTON, II.I.. 

' ' Can school programmes be shortened and enriched ? " is 
the title of a paper read by President Kliot at Washington in 
February last, before the Department of Superintendence of the 
National Educational Association. This paper was published in 
the Atlantic Monthly of August. 

The schools President Eliot has in mind are the public 
schools below the grade of the high school. If his premises are 
granted, his argument is conclusive. 

First: It is of immense importance to the American people, 
that the age of American youths at the completion of their pro- 
fessional education should be lowered. 

Secondly. The time occupied in their education may, con- 
ceivably, be shortened by shortening the post-graduate or profes- 
sional course, by shortening the college course, by shortening the 
preparatory or high school course, or, lastly, by shortening the 
grammar school course. 

But, the post-graduate course cannot be shortened; the 
college course cannot be materially shortened; the course of 
specific preparation for college — say of four years — as at Exeter 
Academ}' or at any well-conducted high school, cannot be short- 
ened without loss (for, he says, ' * any secondary school taking its 
pupils in the average condition of the boys who enter Exeter 
Academy can hardly do more for them in four years than is now 
accomplished for them in that academy.) 



How CAN ScHOOiv Programmes be Enriched? 35 

It follows plainly, that what must be done at some point and 
cannot be done at any other stage in the pupil's progress, must be 
done in the grammar school course. And what must be done can 
be done. President Kliot then proceeds to indicate how it can be 
done. 

With much that he says we find ourselves in sympathy, 
but we cannot sympathize with his tone of urgency and insistence, 
as if the lowering of the average age of admission to college from 
19 years to 18 years, were a question of the highest possible im- 
portance. His anxiety on this point is expressed in a tone of 
alarm. "College men," he says, '' are anxiously looking to see 
if the American school courses cannot be shortened, so that our 
bo3^smay come to college at eighteen instead of nineteen;" and 
again, " the anxiety with which men charged with the conduct 
of college education look at this question, is increased by the 
relative decline of American colleges as a whole ;" and again, he 
speaks of *' this serious difficulty which is embarrassing the whole 
course of American education." 

In these utterances President Kliot speaks for himself and 
not for all — not for most — college men. He may be right. To 
his penetrating vision*a real monster big with evil omen may loom 
threateningly, while men less discerning have failed to see it in 
all its fateful and portentous proportions ; or is he a conjurer and 
does he impose upon himself with his own magic ? [He certainly 
deceives himself in thinking that he is warranted in speaking 
thus for college men as a body. At a meeting of college officers 
of the New England colleges, held more than a year ago, the ma- 
jority of the college men present declared themselves not anxious 
that the average age of admission to college should be materially 
reduced.] 

Many are disposed to think that certain advantages are 
gained from life and study in college by students who graduate 
at 23 years of age and upwards which are not in equal degree 



36 Prockkdings of thk CoIvIvKGK Skction. 

secured by younger students. These young men coming to their 
studies of history and philosophy, of ethics and politics, and to 
their participation in those business affairs of class and fraternity 
organizations, and in those literary and oratorical competitions 
which make college life a little world, get a degree of discipline 
from these studies and activities, a thoroughness of preparation 
for their larger spheres of action in the world of business and 
politics, which at an earlier age they could not gain. 

It is not altogether certain that President Eliot is right in 
thinking that any balance of advantage lies in favor of the earlier 
graduation. It is quite certain that the advantages in favor of 
early graduation are not so surely known and so tremendously 
big that the burning educational question of the day is how to ge| 
our boys into college a year earlier than now. One reason named 
by President Kliot for his own anxiety and the alleged anxiety of 
college men with reference to the age of admission to college is 
"the relative decline of American colleges as a whole," and in 
proof of this relative decline he states that from 1875 to 1884 there 
was an increase of only 23 per cent, in the number of students in 
colleges, while the population is thought to have increased about 
33 per cent. We ought not to lose sight of the fact that our in- 
crease of population, both by immigration and propagation, belongs 
in much the largest part to those classes whose traditions and in- 
heritance practically bar the way for themselves and for their 
children to a liberal education. An advance of 23 per cent, in 
the number of college students may be considered in good reason 
not a relative decline but a substantial advance. The colleges 
are more than holding their own in their influence with the dis- 
tinctly American population, and in their power to attract and 
hold students. 

Mr. Kliot laments that * * for sixty years the average age of 
admission to Harvard College has been rising, and has now 
reached the extravagant limit of eighteen years and ten months. ' ' 



How CAN ScHOoi. Programmes bk Knrichkd ? 37 

He does not tell us, what is essential to a just consideration of this 
alarming fact, that Harvard College has been advancing its re- 
quirements for admission quite beyond the increase of age which 
he deplores. Dr. Peabody, the venerable college pastor at Cam- 
bridge for many years, and still connected with the faculty of 
Harvard College, said at a meeting of the National Educational 
Association a few years ago, that Harvard College requires now a 
better education for admission, than forty years ago it required 
for graduation. But Mr KHot would not for a moment entertain 
the thought of lowering the present conditions of admission. 
He expresses his solicitude that "the standard of the A. B. may 
not be lowered," but "that our boys may come to college at 
eighteen instead of nineteen, and that they may bring to college 
at eighteen more than they now bring at nineteen." Yet, though 
we are inclined to smile at President Eliot's distress over the "ex- 
travagant limit now reached for the average age of admission to 
Har^^ard College, and over the mournful fact that the average 
college student in the smaller colleges is undoubtedly . nearly 
twenty- three years old at graduation," he may have some wise 
counsel for us that we shall welcome with cordial appreciation. 

If there is no such urgent need that our school courses should 
be shortened, v^^e shall be very glad to find that they can be en- 
riched. If they can be both shortened and enriched, we shall be 
quite willing to gain time as well as enrichment. Indeed, the 
very process of shortening is an enrichment provided in the con- 
densing process everything essential be retained. The engine 
that can make the longest run in the shortest time with the 
heaviest load is of largest value. The training of the mind that 
gives equally good results in a shorter time, not only saves time 
for other uses, but produces richer results in the mind itself, 
making it by so much the more perfect instrument of the human 
will. 

The time saved may be used, if it should amount to a full 



38 ■ Proceedings of the Coi.i.kgk Section. 

year in some cases, or to two years possibly, in other cases, in giv- 
ing to these exceptional pupils an earlier entrance on a college 
course; or it may be made to enrich the student by his use of it 
in manual training, in studies and readings parallel to his class 
work and broadening the range of his thought, in elementary studies 
supplementary to his school course and anticipating the advanced 
studies that are to come years later, in collecting cabinets of 
geology and natural history specimens, or in gaining famil- 
iarity with some chosen authors in the literature of our native 
tongue. 

To complete his answer to the question, *' Can school pro- 
grammes be shortened and enriched ? " Mr. Kliot was obliged to 
justify his affirmation by showing how the desired^result could be 
reached. 

First. He would have better teachers employed; and in order 
to do this, ' ' all friends of public education should constantly 
strive to have a better tenure of office established, — a tenure during 
good behavior and efficiency." "Consideration, dignity and 
quietness of mind go with a permanent tenure." 

He would also "increase the average skill of teachers by 
raising the present low proportion of male teachers," alleging 
"the superiority of men as teachers," not on the ground of supe- 
rior intelligence or faithfulness, but for the reason that ' ' men or 
women who take up the service of teaching as a temporary ex- 
pedient are unsatisfactory material," and women, oftener than 
men, " enter the service of the public schools without intention 
of long following the business, and that women are absent from 
duty two to three times as much as men; so that the larger the 
proportion of women in any system of public schools, the larger 
will be the percentage of newly appointed teachers every year, 
and the larger the amount of work done by temporary substitutes." 
He would also secure better teachers by urging superintendents 
and committees and all wise lovers of the public schools to ad- 



How CAN ScHOOiv Programmks be Knrich5:d? 39 

vocate the liberal expenditure of money for teaching rather than 
for mechanical appliances or buildings. ''Cheap teachers and ex- 
pensive apparatus are the reverse of wise practice." 

Secondly. He would have better programmes. ' ' The courses' ' 
— he takes those of the city of Boston as representing the aver- 
age American programmes — "are not substantial enough, not 
enough meat in the diet, do not bring forward the child fast 
enough to maintain his interest. " To the objection that there is 
complaint now of overpressure, he answers that this comes not of 
work, but from lack of interest; that "one problem a child cannot 
solve wears more than ten which he can; that American teaching 
in all grades of schools and in colleges has been chiefly driving 
and judging, while it ought to be leading and inspiring." 

Thirdly. He would save time by diminishing the time spent 
in reviews, and by fewer examinations, and by being content 
-fyfchout the accuracy of knowledge and statement often demanded. 

Fourthly. He disfavors the irregular promotion of brighter 
children and favors the regular promotion of the great body of 
children at the ages set down on the programme, and advises that 
the examinations be made light enough to insure this result. 

Fifthly. He favors longer hours in school, and the provision 
of vacation schools for the least favored children. 

Not all of this counsel can we accept as equally wise. Some 
of it we shall after scrutiny reject as unsound. Most of it, it will 
be well for us, the teachers of Illinois, to accept, and, as we have 
opportunity, to apply. 

We repeat, that we cannot excite in our own mind the agita- 
tion that worries Mr. Kliot over what he conceives to be the 
"relative decline of the colleges." Still, we shall agree with him 
that the colleges of Illinois and of other states would like to see 
and could well care for many more students from the homes of Ill- 
inois than are now persuaded to seek a liberal education; and that 
great advantage would accrue to the State of Illinois, if every year 



40 Proce^kdings of thk C01.1.KGK Skction. 

there were added to the number of college alumni in her popula- 
tion five timevS as many new graduates as at present, trained men 
to be leaders of men and organizers of labor in all professions, 
and in all mercantile and industrial pursuits. The number of 
those who will seek a liberal education will be increased by any 
improvement in the thoroughness and real value of the training 
in the elementary schools. A boy's relish or distaste for learning 
which really decides him for or against his prosecution of a liberal 
education is often determined by the influence of his earliest 
teachers. 

The securing of better trained, more devoted, more efiicient 
teachers in the public schools will send out of these schools into 
the colleges more pupils and those pupils better prepared. To 
give capable and experienced teachers a more liberal compensa- 
tion and a securer tenure of office, will bring into the service of 
the state a larger proportion of men, and will secure and retain in 
service a larger number of both men and women of eminent 
ability and superior professional skill. This result secured, 
the school programmes will be enriched, and the overflow of 
riches will beautify and gladden the entire state. The benefits of 
education are like mercy, their '* quality is not strained." They 
bless him that gives and him that takes, and then they cease not 
in their beneficence, but each one who receives a benefit becomes 
himself a benefactor and in ever widening circles the initial im- 
pulse of blessing propagates itself until there is not a hamlet but 
is made richer, not an acre of soil but has added value, not a 
weary toiler but bears his burdens more easily. 

In Mr. Eliot's first point we confess our indebtedness to him 
for good counsel. Not that he has said anything new or strange, 
but that what he says is true, that it is worth saying, and worth 
repeating, and that repetition of it is likely to deepen conviction 
of its truth with our legislators and our boards of education, on 



How CAN School Programmes b:^ Enriched? 41 

whose liberality we are dependent for tlie increased compensation 
which is needed to secure the better teachers. 

2. Mr. Eliot's second and most important counsel will per- 
haps be conceded by all to be true when stated in its general 
form, that the programmes can be bettered. We are all of us 
willing to acknowledge in general the imperfection of our work, 
though prone to deny, sometimes promptly and with spirit, any 
specific imperfections alleged by our critics. We adopt the lan- 
guage of the litany : *' Have mercy upon us poor miserable sin- 
ners," but will have it that in this or that particular, in which 
others see us to have been wrong, we were just right. 

When Mr. Eliot says " the diet is not substantial enough," I 
imagine many will be quick to claim that in this point he is all 
wrong. But is he not right f Is he not very right ? Is not 
this the truest and most vital criticism of the American schools of 
to-day, that "the programmes are not substantial enough," that 
they ' * do not bring the child forward fast enough to maintain in- 
terest and induce him to put forth his strength." Has not the 
public school system below the high school gradually come to take 
its present shape from the anxiety of teachers and superintendents 
to make it practicable for all the children in the community, the 
most sluggish in intellect, the weakest in physical endurance, the 
least favored in home conditions, to keep pace with the yearly prog- 
ress of the school work ? As a result, the work for all has been graded 
down to the infirmity of the weakest, while those of medium or 
superior capacity have been able to meet the requirements of the 
school course while putting one-half or one-third of their time 
and strength into their studies. Hence, idleness and mischief in 
the school-room taxing the invention of the teacher to restrain the 
bright boy by penalties, when a wise course would be to seek to 
incite him to high ambition and noble enthusiasm, guiding him in 
special studies and rewarding, with special honors, worthy efforts 
and noteworthy attainments. Hence, perplexity of parents to 



42 Proceedings of the Coi.i.ege Section. 

keep the boy, idle and restless and mischievous at school, from 
being discontented with profitable uses of his time at home. 
Hence, out of our best schools, and among the children of culti- 
vated homes, boys of ten or twelve years on the streets out of 
school hours, day and evening, — not habituated at any hour 
of the day to hard tasks in study — all their school life and all 
their home life self-indulgent, ease-loving, pleasure-loving, mis- 
chief-loving, — poisoning their bodies with cigarettes, and poison- 
ing their minds with the reading of trashy or filthy novels. Is 
this a picture of the imagination ? Would it were so ! But does 
not the knowledge of every citizen summon before him, if not in 
his own children, in some children of his neighbors, a vision of 
that which is, alas, too real? But it will be said in exculpation 
of the schools and ofiicers, * ' Have parents no responsibility ? Is 
not the child out of school hours beyond the jurisdiction of the 
teacher, and if the child's idle and vicious habits give little hope 
of stability of character and usefulness, is the teacher to take the 
blame to himself, when he labors with unceasing solicitude for 
the intellectual and moral welfare of his pupils ?" 

I^et us, friends and fellow teachers, be willing to see the whole 
truth as to our responsibility. The teacher's responsibility does 
not end with the closing of the school for the day or for the term. 
No more does the parent's responsibility cease for the day when 
the pupil enters the school room, to be resumed by him when the 
pupil passes out from the presence of the teacher. The partner- 
ship of teacher and parent, in the shaping of the child's future by 
intellectual and moral training, is like the partnership of father. and 
mother in the physical endowment of the child and in parental 
care, an undivided and indivisible partnership. '* The whole child 
is sent to school. ' ' Body, mind and heart are committed to the 
teacher. An eminent educator in ian eastern school said tome, 
" It matters not what my teacher of arithmetic is, in habits or be. 
lief, so that he knows arithmetic and can teach arithmetic." No 



How CAN ScHOOi. Programmes bk Enriched? 43 

falser, no more pernicious doctrine than this. Let us awa}^ with it, 
if it has found lodgment in our pedagogic creed. Let us be intoler- 
ant of it wherever it finds expression. The teacher imparts him- 
self, his whole self, to the pupil. The teacher's responsibility to- 
ward the pupil is discharged only when he has done his utmost for 
the pupil's good in all respects, and he should not be satisfied 
that he has done his utmost for the pupil's good, if that pupil in 
any hour of the twenty-four or in any day of the seven, goes 
wrong. Just as a mother, who has enshrined herself in her boy's 
heart in the years of his childhood, when that boy is separated 
from her by years of wandering over all oceans and continents, 
should be with him in his thought of her a restraining and guid- 
ing and impelling power to hold him to purity and honor, so the 
teacher's well-devised programme of work and right personal ex- 
ample and firm exercise of authority and unfailing sympathetic 
interest in all that concerns the boy's welfare, having given wise 
direction to his energies in the hours of his school days, should 
give character to the boy's actions in all other hours, putting the 
teacher at the boy's side, a genial presence, in his work and in 
his play, in his solitude and among his boon companions, in his 
day dreams and in his dreams by night, making him to recoil, 
when tempted, from those thoughts and actions which he would 
be ashamed to entertain or to commit if the friendly eye of the 
teacher were upon him. Is this too much for the teacher to exact 
of himself ? This is the ideal, and short of it we shouM never rest 
satisfied. There is a principal of a high school of 800 pupils in a 
New England city of 100,000 population, who has achieved a suc- 
cess most of us would have thought impossible. Before two 
months have passed at the beginning of the year he can call by 
name every one of the pupils of the newly-entered class, and he 
has made every one of them feel that he has an interest in what- 
ever concerns their studies, their health, their plans, their pleas- 
ures. He meets this lowest class two hours each week for a year, 



46 Prockedings of thk C01.1.EGE Section. 

When I look at the programme, I see that in the second year 
multiplication and division tables to 12's are completed. From 
this point, for five years, more than two-thirds of the time on 
arithmetic is wasted. Better results in arithmetic would be 
secured by spending fifteen minutes a day for three years in drill 
in rapid combinations, and in extending the multiplication table 
to 25, then resuming the arithmetic and proceeding with accu- 
racy, and rapidity, and pleasure to the pupil, scarcely ever known 
by pupils under the present programmes. And in the last two 
years of the grammar school some time could be found to alternate 
lessons in arithmetic with lessons in geometry and physics. 

The time thus saved might judiciously be used in reading 
wholesome biographies adapted to the advancing age of pupils, 
giving early a taste for literature and a love of history, and mak- 
ing it possible for teachers to vary the amount of reading suggested 
to pupils according to their home conditions of leisure or occu- 
pation, and according to the facility developed in taking the sense 
of what is read. 

Not too much time is given to geography, but in this time 
much, more can be done than is usually done in suggesting col- 
lateral reading, making the text book lesson the starting point for 
wide excursions in literary reading on topics suggested by the 
names of historic places and persons named in the text book. 
Such reading would have its great value, not only as giving 
occupation for the pupil's leisure time at home, and filling up all 
time in school, to the cure of mischievous propensities, and not 
only in filling the mind with information at a time when memory 
is most impressible and retentive, to be of untold value in after 
years, but in disciplining th^ pupil's mind to the ready interpre- 
tation of thought and to the power of free and animated expression. 
This would make it possible to save much of the three years now 
spent on formal English grammar, which could profitably be given 
to the study of the elements of some kindred language, the French 



How CAN School Programmes bk Enriched? 47 

or German or Latin. The French programmes, as recited by Mr. 
Bliot, in these respects have excellent features for our imitation* 
They give not more than one-third the time we do to arith- 
metic. They give to the French language and literature much 
more time than we to English, and yet at eight years of age the 
French boy is set to studying some foreign language, either the 
German or English, and, by this daily study of his own language 
in comparison with another, he comes to understand it better than 
if it were studied apart by itself for many years. The French 
boy's study of history begins with biography, as we have sug- 
gested should be the case with the American child. 

We conclude that Mr. Eliot is right in claiming that the Amer- 
ican programmes can be improved, enriched, very much enriched. 
Meanwhile the intelligent American teacher, overcoming the inertia 
that contents him with keeping up to the system, and devising 
ways of his own to quicken the pace of his pupils in what he is 
required to have them do, so as to secure time for what they will 
take delight in, for recreations outside of the curriculum, may win 
credit to himself — to herself — from pupils and parents, and have 
the satisfaction of seeing an unprecedented development of intelli- 
gence and moral earnestness in the hearts and minds of many pupils. 
Many teachers have gone a little way in this direction. Who will 
have the courage of conviction and the pioneering sagacity to 
blaze the way through this, as yet, untracked forest, making a 
new path in which others may follow ? '^!/ 

Mr. Eliot, in his third point, proposing to save time by less 
reviewing and by fewer examinations, and by making no strenuous 
claim upon the pupils for accuracy of knowledge and accuracy of 
statement, is wholly wrong as he has been in the first and second 
points wholly right. No time is more profitably spent than in 
judicious reviews, which should always be new views, a reconsid- 
eration of subjects in new combinations, and in the guiding light 
of new inquiries. No more valuable educational implement is 



48 Prockkdings of the C01.1.EGE Section. 

there than a judiciously-conducted examination, and these should 
be frequent — tests not so much of what students remember as of 
what they can do, confining memory to the fewest elementary 
matters, the essential data of reasoning and leading them not to 
recall by memory but to reproduce by reasoning processes, the 
rules and formulas in the mathematics and in the languages. And 
as to accuracy of attainment — accuracy in the essential elements of 
any topic, accuracy in the process of reasoning, accuracy in statement 
of results, if the pupil is ever to be trustworthy as a servant or as 
a master of other men, he must from the first be taught to be 
accurate. Strange counsel to teachers from a teacher of teachers, 
from the President of the oldest college in the country, that they 
;are not to expect to bring on their pupils to the habit of accuracy 
in adding long columns of figures, or to the ability to find the 
greatest common divisor or the least common multiple of several 
numbers. I<et us hope few teachers will be misled by these 
unwise counsels. 

4. In his fourth point he is partly right and partly wrong — 
right in deprecating the common evil of retardation, wrong 
in disfavoring irregular promotions. The system is slow enough 
so that few children, unless interrupted by absence, should be 
allowed to fall behind. And this evil should be prevented, not 
by grading down the examinations to reach the infirmity of dull- 
ness, but by enkindling the zeal and aiding the halting steps of 
the naturally sluggish children so as to bring them up to the re- 
quirements of judicious exa'hinations. 

The irregular promotion of strong pupils is just the thing 
wanted to serve their interests and to quicken the pulse of the 
whole system of schools and keep the blood from, stagnating. 
Where; pupils are entered in school at the age of 8 or 9, as not un- 
frequently happens, it should be expected that they T^ould advance 
more rapidly than those who enter at 5 or 6, and would do in one year 
the work of two or three. So, when the child's heredity and home 



How CAN ScHOOiv Programmers ber Knrichkd? 49 

environment give him exceptional advantage, he should be en- 
couraged within the limits of prudent regard for health, and with 
the concurrence of his parents, to proceed ahead of his class and 
overtake the class in advance, and many pupils can save two and 
some three years, and do the whole work well. 

It is just this fault of the systems now in vogue, holding 
classes to regular solid advancement year by year, and saying to 
teachers, "within this year [the fourth year of the course,] give 
exercises in addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division ; 
multiplier 3 figures, divisor 12 or less, result in no case to exceed 
three periods," that gives occasion for many educators to say — 
better the old unsystematic schools of a generation ago than these 
restraining bands that hold back a wide-awake pupil who can 
easily be led to move on beyond the prescribed routine, but no, 
" in no case for this year shall the sum exceed three periods." 

The teacher in the handling of an improved programme 
should be free to exercise a wide discretion in modifying the pro- 
gramme. In the exercise of this freedom, under responsibility 
to superiors and to the public, he should be guided by such judg- 
ments as these : 

The system is for the good of the individuals, not the indi- 
viduals subordinate to the system. 

The supreme interest of the teacher should be in the pupil-^ 
not in the school, not in his own reputation, not in the subjects 
he teaches, but in the pupil. The life is more than meat, the 
soul is more than truth. The great Teacher valued the Truth 
he came to teach as a means to an end, praying for his disci- 
ples, the pupils whom he yearned over with a longing which 
makes him in this, as in other respects, the great exemplar 
for all true teachers, "Sanctify them through thy truth." 
" All effective Christian work for men," says Dr. Smyth in the 
Andover Review^ "requires an open eye for the individual, a 
love for persons." In the same spirit we may say, all educa- 



50 Proceedings of the C01.1.EGE Section. 

tional work worthy to be esteemed highly successful, requires an 
open eye for the individual, a love of the teacher for his pupils, 
one by one — a love that reckons upon their differences, and adapts 
itself in teaching methods and in arts of inspiration and guidance to 
each, as food should be prepared differently for different ages and 
tastes, and as an overgrown and awkward boy should not have 
his clothing determined by his years, but fitted to his person. 

Discipline is worth more than knowledge. The tests deter- 
mining promotions should be tasks given to be done, rather 
than tests of memory. These tests should seek to ascertain, 
not so much the amount of present knowledge, as the power 
to learn, to interpret, to give expression to thought. The 
faculty of Princeton College made a mistake when they refused 
to receive Alexander Hamilton's application for admission with 
the privilege of advancing as rapidly as he could, doing the col- 
lege work thoroughly. He gained admission to King's College 
(now Columbia College) on his own terms, and made the course 
in two years. The Hamiltons are few in number, but they should 
have their chance. All our schools should be elastic enough in 
their requirements to give natural powers, original genius, in the 
individual teacher and in the individual pupil, a free chance for 
activity and for coming to their best. 

Finally, the tasks assigned, the tests applied, the rewards 
given, whether words of commendation, premiums, or figures in 
a record book, must be so wisely devised that the pupils of highest 
ability shall not too easily be satisfied, and the feeblest pupils 
may not too easily be discouraged. 



Limitation of State Provision for Education. 51 



LIMITATION OF STATE PROVISION 
FOR EDUCATION. 

BY RKV. J. B. MCMICHAEI<, D. D., PRESIDENT OF MONMOUTH 
COIvIvEGE, MONMOUTH, 11,1,. 

Every truth has its limitations. Pushed beyond the bounda- 
ries which circumscribe its field of action, it becomes an error. It 
is out of right relations with the established order of things and is 
a disturber of the peace in the field which it enters. That I have 
a right to do as I please is the magna charta of personal liberty, 
but, unlimited, it is destructive of the liberty of everyone else. 
When I interfere with the rights of another, my 
unlimited liberty ceases to be a rule of right action. It is the lim- 
itation which makes it right. 

Institutions which enjoy the right to exist are subject to like 
limitations and can only enjoy the right to exist as long as these 
limitations are respected. When transcended, injury is done to 
all, their efiiciency is impaired and the end for which they were 
established is defeated. 

The family, the church, and the state are three institutions 
organized to meet the wants and secure the civil, social and relig- 
ious rights of man. He is a three-fold being and these institu- 
tions are founded in his nature and are necessary to his symmet- 
rical development. To realize his possibilities the same individ- 
ual must be a member of the three. This may be questioned by 
those who are tenacious for everything else but the development 
of their spiritual natures; but it will not be questioned by anyone 
who has a proper appreciation of what he is and what he was in- 
tended to be. Wherever else it might be necessary to elaborate 
this point it is certainly not necessary in the presence of men who 



52 Procej:^dings of thk CoIvIvKGe) Section. 

would sooner question the reality of their social and civil rela- 
tions than to doubt their spiritual. By all such, the family, the 
dhurch, and the state are recognized as institutions which have a 
right to exist, and, as for the others, it will be time enough to 
attend to them when they shall have succeeded in eliminating the 
moral element of manhood. 

Bach of these institutions is sovereign in its domain, servant 
outside of it. Inside it commands, outside it obeys. Thus far 
and no farther. The state cannot do the work of the church nor 
can the church do the work of the state ; and when they attempt 
it the work of neither will be done. To do its own work each 
must have its own agencies, educate its own subjects and attend 
strictly to its own business. There is room for both of them, oc- 
cupying the same territory and claiming allegiance from the same 
subjects. While there is to be no union of the church and state, 
there is to be no conflict between them. Under God each is to 
contribute to the welfare of the other. ' ' Render unto Caesar the 
things whibh are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are 
God's." 

The protestatit church has ever been the fast and unswerv- 
ing frieiid of the public school system. Were it not for the Chris- 
tian element of the country our schools would not be in the 
healthy condition they now are. Far from it. What would they 
be without the active support of the protestant church ? In view 
of this, should the church raise the qtiestion of limitation of state 
appropriation for school purposes, it is neither in accordance 
with the facts nor in sympathy with the spirit of fairness that sh« 
should be represented as unfriendly to state schools; and to what- 
ever extent I may here represent the views of the church on this 
question, I must not be so understood. On the contrary, we 
maintain that popular government is conditioned upon popular 
education, and that the republic, under forfeit of her right to livfe, 
is bound to see to it that such an education is provided. 



I/IMITATION OF STATED PROVISION FOR KdUCATION. 53 

Of necessity, there must be schools operated by the state and 
for the state. .These schools are not to be limited to the primary 
or rudimentary schools, not even to the high schools, provided 
they do not put on university airs, undertaking to give instruc- 
tion in the whole range of literatures, arts, sciences and philoso- 
phies, and rounding up with a graduation which suggests that 
there is nothing beyond to be desired. Nor will we object to the 
state normal if it is to be what it professes to be, a professional 
school for training teachers. But you can't train until you have 
something to train. Education is first in order, and it should be 
obtained at those schools which the state has already founded to 
give it. We object to the state making another appropriation to 
educate the same persons for whom appropriations are made to the 
high school, the grammar school and possibly to the kindergar- 
ten. Eliminating these, those who remain will be better taught 
and at a reduced cost to the state ; and, in addition to this, the 
people will have the satisfaction of knowing that their money is 
expended in accordance with the terms of assessment, the train- 
ing of teachers. Nor do we approach the state university in an 
iconoclastic spirit, but rather to set bounds to its ambition in the 
direction of the state treasury. Even these it is our purpose to 
place along the lines of justice and equity. lyike conditions call 
for like appropriations, but as the conditions in the various states 
, and at various times in the same state are seldom if ever the 
same, no estimate in dollars and cents can be fixed upon as the 
rule of equity in every case, but each case at the time is to be de- 
termined upon its own merit. 

Were there no institutions excepting the state to betaken into 
consideration in passing upon educational appropriations, still, 
upon other grounds of a sound political economy, limitations 
must be observed, not so restricted, it is true, but they must nev- 
ertheless obtain. But the state is not the only institution 
founded in the interest of man, and it is therefore not to assume 



54 Prccekdings of the College Section. 

the right to lay under tribute all his resources in the development 
of the state. The old Spartan idea that the state is everything 
and the man nothing but a citizen, a mere peg in the machinery 
of government, is not the idea of statehood and manhood to-day. 
We want something more than citizens — we want men. Good 
citizens are made out of good men, and you can't make them out 
of anything else. 

I. I insist upon limited provision for education by the state be- 
cause unlimited state instruction is dangerous in its tendencies, 
threatening not only the integrity of the federal constitution but 
the constitution of manhood. A bill recently introduced into the 
Senate of the United States by Senator Ingalls, and which is still 
pending, provides for the founding of a "great commanding na- 
tional university, whose degrees, conferred only upon rigid ex- 
amination, would become the standard by which literary and sci- 
entific eminence would be measured throughout the nation. Such 
a University, if successful, would become the seat of supreme aca- 
demic influence, giving character to the curriculum, standard and 
aims of all state, local, and independent universities in the land." 
The logical outcome of such a scheme, should it be successfully 
inaugurated, would be the absolute centralization of a national 
system of education under government control. The realization 
of the national system includes the school in every neighbor- 
hood, the high school in every town, a higher one 
in every county, the normal in every congressional 
district, the university in every state, and all unified, 
and practically governed, by the university of the nation. 
Teachers, books, and methods, in every school within the system, 
are to be measured, fitted, and worn according to the pattern given 
from the central office. And in this system, and through these 
schools, everything, ranging through the whole diameter and 
around the entire circumference of human knowledge, is to be 
taught, excepting the knowledge of God. All this upon the 



lylMlTATlON OF STATB PROVISION FOR EDUCATION. 55 

simple plea of citizenship. It may make citizens, but it will not 
make men. They have all been run through the same mould, 
fashioned after the same pattern, and polished by the same process, 
and is it illogical to conclude that the individuality and indepen- 
dence of manhood have been educated out of them, and they no 
longer think as men, made in the image of God, but as citizens, 
made in the image of the state and by the state? As big a thing 
as is the proposed national scheme of secular education, it is not 
as big as manhood, which it proposes to educate, and therefore 
under the instruction of such a system the man must necessarily 
come infinitely short of his possibilities. Much might be said in 
behalf of the reserved rights of the states in educational matters, 
and of the unconstitutionality of the assumption and exercise of 
such powers by the government, but it shall not be said here. I 
am content to say that such unlimited state provision for schools 
is a violation of the constitution of manhood. 

2. I also object, beyond limited restrictions, to state appro- 
priations for the higher education, because it unjustly discrimi- 
nates against the church. The discrimination is not in the fact 
that the state makes no appropriation to the church for the edu- 
cation of her subjects. She wants none. She voluntarily builds 
and operates her own schools in addition to what has been col- 
lected from her membership to support the higher education of 
the state. When her membership, as citizens, pay their full pro- 
portion of the school fund for the education of the people, is it 
not a stinging injustice that they should still be taxed for univer- 
sity education, the education of lawyers, physicians, and profes- 
sional experts, for the good of the common people ; and as a 
compensation for this, is granted the privilege of founding and 
operating her' own academies, colleges, and universities for the 
higher education of the church. It is not difficult for Americans 
to see that a state church is a costly luxury to dissenting Christ- 
ians. Against it our fathers protested to the extent of expatriation, 



56 PrOGKKDINGS of ^HK CoiylvKGE^ SECTION. 

and to this day their children are delicately sensitive upon the 
subject. Is not the principle of the establishment here ? There 
all must pay to the support of the establishment. Should any 
through conscientious convictions dissent from its teachings and 
withdraw from its fellowship, they are graciously accorded the 
privilege of building their own meeting house, paying their own 
preacher, and the preacher of the establishment as well. 

Beyond certain limitations, taxation to support higher edu- 
cation ceases to be a virtue. By her schools the cnurch is edu- 
cating the people of the state, and the education which is good 
for the church is good for the state. Over one hundred voluntary 
schools, academies, seminaries, colleges and universities have 
been chartered by the state of Illinois which do not receive from 
her a dollar for their support. After educating nine out of every 
ten who receive more than a high school education, she is then 
equally taxed with the other citizens of the commonwealth to ed- 
ucate the other one. It seems to me that the line of limitation to 
state provision should be found somewhere in this latitude, some- 
times above, sometimes below the peaks along the high school 
range, according to the relative condition of church and state. 

3. Again, I insist upon the limitation of appropriation on the 
ground of the character of state schools. It is readily conceded that 
Tnany devoted Christian men are to be found in these institutions 
whose life and teaching are a positive force in the line of Christian 
manhood; but, on the other hand, consider the number whose life 
and teaching are positively in the other direction, and the institu- 
tion, as -an institution, confessedly stands at zero upon the subject 
of Christian theism. 

"The tide," says President Porter, "is now setting strongly 
towards the complete secularization of our public educational 
system. It may be the current will prevail. Should it rtish 
through our higher schools, and sweep out from them all oppor- 
tunity for reflective thought on God, and duty, and iriimortality; 



Limitation of State Provision for Education. 57 

should it exclude all study of history in the light of God's pres- 
ence and guiding hand, and #1 inspiration of literature which is 
furnished by faith and worship — it will give us an education so 
barren and degrading that Christian parents will abandon the 
high schools in abhorrence, and will shun the universities to 
which they open the way as they would the infected wards of a 
house of death." 

The question which concerns us here is not so much whether 
the state university is, should, or can be religious in its instruc- 
tion, as whether it is or can be neutral upon the subject of re- 
ligion. In fact, the question is, what kind of a religious philos- 
ophy is the state university to teach ? Theistic or atheistic ? The 
trend of the teaching of the school must teach something on the 
subject. How many of the subjects within the range of univer- 
sity instruction have not touched upon the supernatural in their 
origin and history ? Certainly not the literatures, sciences and 
philosophies. They are woven in and out and through and 
through with mythical legends, lays and tales; with religions false 
and religion true. We fnight have a little empirical philosophy, 
cold logic and pure mathematics, but these might be had without 
the expensive luxury of a university. The studies pursued in the 
lower grade of schools are not so fraught with the great philo- 
sophical questions which pre-emenently belong to the university; 
and successfully to steer clear of God when following up these 
great philosophical lines of thought from the efiScient to the final, 
or from the final to the efiicient cause, is an attainment which 
human ingenuity has not yet reached. We quote from the Prince- 
ton T^^z'xVze^, volume 2, page 133: "The universe must be con- 
ceived of either in a theistic or an atheistic light. It must originate 
in and develop through intelligence or in atoms and force and 
chance. Teleology must be acknowledged everywhere or denied 
everywhere. Philosophy, ethics, jurisprudence, political and so- 
cial science can be conceived of and treated only from a theistic 



58 Proceedings of the Coeeege Section. 

or from an atheistic point of view.% The proposal to treat it from 
a neutral point of view is ignorant and absurd. .... It is cer- 
tain that throughout the entire range of the higher education a 
position of religious indifferentism is an absolute impossibility, 
that along the entire line the relation of man and of the universe 
to the ever-present God and the supreme Lord of the conscience 
and heart, the non-affirmation of the truth is entirely equivalent 
to the affirmation at every point, of its opposite." Such schools 
do not provide such an education as the church requires, and 
therefore she must educate her own children, if that is the best 
the state can do for the higher education, She asks no division 
of the public funds for this purpose. She only asks that she be 
not robbed of her resources b}^ taxation and compelled to support 
an atheistic institution that robs her hearth-atones and her altars 
of her sons and daughters and fits them for anything else than for 
citizenship in the kingdom of God. 

4. I insist upon limitations of state provision for educa- 
tion because much of the education by the state is unnecessary. 

(a) Much of the work done by the state university is in 
the line of special training, which neither directly nor indirectly 
is of any special advantage to the state ; that is, those who have 
been so educated are of no greater advantage to the state than 
those who have been educated in other schools. Is it necessary 
that the people should be taxed for the education of lawyers, 
physicians, and experts in the various lines of the applied sci- 
ences ? Luxuries are not necessaries. It is not equity that the 
many should be taxed for the luxuries of the few. When the 
people have paid for the professional education of their lawjxrs 
and doctors, they find that their services are no better and their 
bills no smaller than those who paid for their own education. 
The beneficiaries of the national academies at West Point and 
Annapolis are required to render some special service for value 
received, but the beneficiaries of our state schools are under no 



Limitation of State Provision for Education. 59 

such obligations and recognize none. If a poor family, decimated 
by sickness and death, is unable to pay the doctor-bill, the state, 
which has educated the officiating doctor, must pay it herself. 
Ministers of the gospel, whom she does not educate, and who 
may be as beneficial in conserving the interest of the state, do 
not collect their bills in that way. 

(b) It is unnecessary, because much of the instruction for 
which state appropriations are made can be given, will be given, 
and is being given by other schools founded and sustained by 
voluntary contributions. How many states are there in which 
;here are not voluntary institutions which rival, if not surpass, 
the state university in the same state? Looking back toward 
the Hast, they are not the institutions which stand out most prom- 
inently. In many of the states you would scarcely know there 
was such an institution were it not for the annual racket in the 
legislature over the state appropriation. In some of the western 
and northwestern states such institutions are relatively more 
prominent. While building up their voluntary schools the people 
have been taxed to found and operate the state university, so 
that the race for preeminence has been an unequal one. But 
already, when looking over into the territories of some of these 
states, the university is not by any means the first object of edu- 
cational interest that meets the eye. 

In view of these facts we can safely leave the higher educa- 
tion in the hands of the munificent private patronage, which has, 
even in the childhood of our country, founded and supported 
Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, and others of 
equal efficiency, if not of equal renown. And certainly against 
the most of these the terrible charge of sectarianism cannot be 
sustained. Their spirit is liberal enough lor the most liberal gov- 
ernment. It is wise for any government to stimulate and encour- 
age such a spirit of patronage in behalf of the higher education. 



6o Procekdings of the C01.1.EGE Section. 

If so much has already been done, more may be expected when 
greater private fortunes shall have been accumulated. 

In May next, in honor of his son, who, had he lived, would 
then have been twenty-one years of age. Senator Stanford, of Cali- 
fornia, proposes to found a university on the Pacific coast at a cost of 
$20,000,000 in money and 76,000 acres of land for a campus. 
With such an institution in California surely the plea of necessity 
can not be urged in behalf of a state university in that state, at 
least. The like has already occurred in other states, and will 
continue to occur in others still with the encouragement of great 
opportunities, created by the limitation of state provision for edu- 
cation. 



Education. 6i 



EDUCATION. 

BY REV. WII.I.IAM C. ROBERTS, D. D., 1.1,. D., PRESIDENT OF I,AKE FOREST 
UNIVERSITY, II,I,INOIS. 

The necessity and value of general education have long since 
ceased to be matters of discussion. Even those who sympathize 
with Adam Smith in his opposition to governmental interference 
in higher and liberal education readily concede that that of the 
masses is an exception to this principle. It is generally believed 
that the belter instructed the citizen is the more prosperous and 
influential will the state be. But before the benefits of general 
training and intelligence can be secured for the lower classes, the 
government, says Mr. Say, "must undertake it at public expense. 
It must establish primary schools for reading, writing and arith- 
metic, for they form the ground-work of knowledge and the sole 
means that can be secured at present for the civilization of the mul- 
titude. A nation cannot be said to be civilized nor, consequently, 
possessed of all the benefits of civilization until the people at 
large are versed in the elementary branches of knowledge." 

It has been afiirmed by many within fifteen years that the state 
should only supplement individual efforts in the direction of edu- 
cation, allowing all who are able to educate their children in 
schools supported by themselves, and confine its own efforts to 
the instruction of the poor. It was seen, however, that in such a 
plan there could be no system; the two kinds of schools would be 
antagonistic, and destitute of a common life, and the state would 
be unable to prevent the inculcation of principles that might prove 
subversive of its influence and authority. A general conviction 
was soon felt that education was too great an interest, and too 



62 Prockkdings of the ColIvKGK Section. 

closel}^ connected with the commonwealth, to be left wholly with- 
out responsibility to the government. Then the homoereneous- 
ness of the nation was thought to be largely dependent on a gen- 
eral system of education. It was necessary it should be general 
in order to avoid invidious comparisons between the different 
classes of youth in the community. Hence the policy was finally 
adopted by every state in the Union of recognizing no distinction 
between the children of the rich and those of the poor, of putting 
them all on the same footing, and of treating them exactly alike. 

Accepting the common school system as moderately wise and 
indispensably necessary to the welfare of the state, I call atten- 
tion, for a few minutes, to the general theme of Education. This 
is one of the greatest questions of our day. It is becoming in- 
creasingly important every year. A limited class of scientific 
men and skeptics allege that there is nothing permanent in our 
present system of education. Rousseau declares that "that of the 
past, with the civilization based upon it, has been absolutely 
wrong, ' ' and offers as his advice to take the road directly opposite 
to that in which we have been traveling, promising that we shall 
thereby do right. Pestalozzi tells us that "he turned the car of 
European progress quite round," implying, of course, that it was 
moving in the wrong direction before he reversed irs wheels. 
Herbert Spencer affirms ' ' that we stand on the border land of a 
great discovery in education." Others of kindred spirit appear to 
be waiting in eager expectation for a total overthrow of our pres- 
ent system of education, and for the introduction of another based 
on a different principle. None of these foretellers of change, how- 
ever, have ventured as yet to give us the outlines of their long- 
looked-for system of education. 

Is there ground for these mysterious forebodings? Do the 
signs of the times point clearly in that direction ? I answer, no. 
A strong presumptive argument against it is found in the fact 
that the main features of the present system of education have 



Education. 63 

stood the tests of time. Education is not like the different species 
of superstition and false religions believed in and perpetuated by 
a single nation, but it is the production of the combined scholar- 
ship of the world. " I am sure," says President Payne, " that I 
do not overstate the fact when I say that the best thinkers 
through all past centuries have been devoted directly or indirectly 
to the problem of education and there is not a single phase of 
this problem which has not been subjected to the most rigid test 
of experience." Is it credible that such a vast and important in- 
terest as that of education should have been misunderstood by the 
acute philosophers of Greece, the practical statesmen of Rome and 
the learned of every nation since ? 

A second argument against the predicted revolution is 
found in the permanent character of the mind and the 
body — the objects to be trained. No essential change 

has taken place in these since the philosophers of Greece 
succeeded in developing both to as high a pitch of per- 
fection as they can be. Are there in the mind buried treasures 
or undiscovered continents to be wrought upon by prin- 
ciples of education which are yet undiscovered? We have no 
evidence of this. 

A third argument against the predicted change in education 
i§ that it would be out of analogy with similar interests that have 
-come down to us through the ages. There can be no doubt that 
great progress has been made within a hundred years in the cause 
of education. "But progress," says another, "is not a force 
that acts spasmodically, but a logical and graduated evolution, in 
which the idea of to day is connected with that of yesterday as 
the latter is to a more remote past." A number of the elements 
of education have come down to us from remote antiquity. They 
have been modified to suit the circumstances of different nations, 
and not supplanted or set aside. There is no reason for believing 
that they will be wholly supplanted in the future. 



64 Procejkdings of the C01.1.KGK Section. 

Conservatism in education, as well as in religion, is of great 
value. It is the part of wisdom to act on the assumption that 
certain things are settled, and not to be examining their 
fundamental principles whenever science or the march of progress 
suggests a conflict between them and new theories. It is our duty 
to seek new improvements in the application of principles, and 
in extending and coordinating old lines of thinking and working. 
Each year should add something new to our system of education, 
either in doctrine or in practice ; each day should bring out some 
revelation of truth, and all should be in the line of development 
;and growth, rather than in the way of destruction and substi- 
tution ! 

I call your attention, secondly, to the theories respecting the 
nature of education. These are very many, but I can only refer 
to two or three. In the introduction to his Grammaire, Condillac 
claims that knowledge in the child is a simple product of experi- 
ence, like the knowledge of the race. Herbert Spencer avers 
" that the child must accord both in mode and arrangement with 
the education of mankind as considered historically. ' ' The prin- 
ciples of educatioQ enunciated by Pestalozzi are the corollaries of 
those of Condillac and Speticer. The correctness of these theories 
depends on the meaning given to the expression " the knowledge 
of the rac3." Their language clearly implies that every genera- 
tion ha 3 had to begin with ignorance and has had to gather by 
personal observation and experience all the knowledge it has ever 
possessed. According to this theory, there can be no progress, 
because each generation begins and ends just where its predeces- 
sors began and ended. Every individual has, in like manner, to 
pursue the same course. The knowledge acquired by others 
avails him nothing ; he is compelled to acquire what he has by 
his own personal exertions. 

In the nature of things, this is impossible. No generation 
can begin in the same place and under the same circumstances as 



Education. 6 



the preceding one, for it falls heir to a large amount of capitalized 
facts a'jd experiences. Its environment is necessarily different 
from that enjoyed by its predecessor. The atmosphere in which 
its first breath is drawn is charged with elements introduced into 
it by those who had lived and breathed before. The same is true, 
also, of individuals. The circumstances of their birth, the agen- 
cies active in m guiding their character, and the language used by 
them are all made for them. 

The teachings of history are also opposed to this theory of 
l^nowledge. It assures us that every generation has made consid- 
erable progress in education. But "progress can be made only 
on two conditions," says Cousin; "first to represent all of one's 
predecessors, then to be one's self; to sum up all anterior labors 
and to add to them." 

There is a practical difficulty in the way of adopting this 
theory which is insuperable. Men are not able to discover all the 
knowledge which they need, to meet the demands of life. " Much 
of what is indispensably necessary for their guidance," says Dr. 
Payne, "they cannot learn at all, so difficult of attainment is it, 
and so engrossing are the special activities involved in the support 
of daily life. If the food eaten or the water drunk has to be ana- 
lyzed, we are bound to buy, borrow or beg the knowledge or the 
skill of the expert. " 

The true theory respecting the nature of knowledge is that it 
includes not only all that we feel and observe but, also, all that 
we can reproduce of what has been felt and observed by others. 
The mind acquires knowledge, not by having it poured into it as 
water is poured into a vessel, but by its own activity. It ac- 
quires sense-knowledge by sense-activity, thought-knowledge by 
thought-activity, and experience-knowledge by consciousness. 
The I^atin word ' ' educo ' ' comes nearer than any other term to set- 
ting forth the true process of acquiring knowledge. It means to 
draw out the dormant powers of the soul into active exercise. 



66 PrOCKKDINGS of THE) CoivIvKGiS SECTION. 

Knowledge is the result of a mental act, or a series of mental acts. 

What, it may be asked next, is the aim of education f This 
quest" on has been various!}^ answered by different individuals and 
nations, according to their surroundings and their views of life. 
Plato, who was a great philosopher, saw the end of education 
through the medium of psychology, hence declared it to be " the 
making of the mind the perfect instrument of thought, ' ' John 
Milton, who was an important factor in the political and military 
movements of his day, said " that the aim of a co:nplete and gen- 
erous education is to get men to perform justly, skillfully and 
magnanimously all the offices, both public and private, of peace 
and war." lyooking at it in the light of his own philosophy, 
Herbert Spencer alleges that ' ' to prepare men for complete living 
is the function which education has to discharge." The Jews, who 
had cultivated the mechanic arts more than any other nation of 
their day, regarded education as a means to develop more fully the 
handicrafts and the trades. The Phoenicians, who derived most 
of their living from the sea, looked upon education as the promoter 
of navigation and commerce. The Spartans, who were the most 
warlike people of Greece, declared the end of education to be the 
production of the best military results. The Athenians declared 
it to be culture, and the Romans, the highest skill in practical life. 
In our country, the aim of common school education is alleged to 
be to prepare men to become intelligent citizens. 

There is some truth in all these definitions. Partaking, per- 
haps, too much of their surroundings, they are a little too narrow. 
But, divested of their personal and national considerations, the aim 
of education is to build up a noble character, and to qualify its 
possessor to discharge all the duties of the sphere in which he 
moves. Hence, the instruction of the undergraduate departments 
of our colleges and universities should seek to build up character, 
and that of our professional schools, to prepare men for their 
respective life-work. 



Education. 67 

I call attention, further, to the qualifications of those who are 
called to train the young. About all that is known of education 
in early times is that it was imparted by parents and priests set 
apart for that purpose. The qualifications of teachers have greatly 
varied in different ages. In the memory of many now living, the 
improvement in this direction has Tdccu truly amazing. ' ' Until 
very recently," says a writer in the Princeton Review, " the public 
seems to have depended for schoolmasters upon the probability 
that there would always be some persons fit for nothing else ; some 
lame men that could not work ; some lazy men that would not 
work ; some disabled clergyman, a physician not competent to 
make a living by his profession, or a lawyer waiting for a prac- 
tice ; some youth willing to work hard for a little money to help 
him on his way to his chosen calling ; or some poor man unable 
from the lack of means to reach that end until too late in life to 
profit from it, and thereby compelled to make life's labor of what 
had been designed merely as a step thereto. To choose school- 
teaching from pure preference thereof and after due preparation 
therefor, was exceedingly rare and pertained only to the benevo- 
lent and unselfish, of whom the world has always possessed few, 
and never more than a few. Then the position in which the work 
was put by the public was calculated to make its share of that 
few as slender as possible. Unprovided with proper support 
and exposed to public obloquy, they were crushed often into pen- 
ury even by the state governments, which kept down the rate of 
salaries to the point of starvation." 

h few men far in advance of their times discovered these 
defects in the preparation of teachers and put forth strenuous 
efforts to correct them. I^a Salle, superintendent of public schools 
in France, finding it almost impossible to secure competent 
teachers for his schools, opened a seminary at Rheims 
for the express purpose of qualifying teachers for their 
work. A genuine normal school was established in 1792 



68 Procekdings of thk College Section. 

by Lakanal, at Paris. A little later the Germans moved 
ia the same direction. This called the attention of the nations 
to the much-needed reform in the education and character of 
schoolmasters. 

Massachusetts was the first state in this country to inquire 
into the subject, and to inaugurate a reform. This led to the es- 
tablishment of the first normal school in the United States. ' ' Hor- 
ace Mann," says Mr. Mayo, "struck the keynote of progress 
when he placed Father Pierce, Samuel J. May, and Tillinghast 
at the head of his new normal school. From that day to the pres- 
ent the state normal schools of New England have been under 
the control of a teaching faculty whose labors form one of the 
most instructive chapters in the history of American education. ' ' 
New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and adjacent states fol- 
lowed her example, until the normal school has come to be re- 
garded as one of the most important departments of our education- 
al system. 

The establishment of these schools and the discussions con- 
nected therewith have tended very largely to improve the tone of 
public sentiment, and to elevate the staidard of general training 
for teachers, but it is by no means certain that the Normal School, 
as we now have it, is to prove the panacea for the defects in the 
training of teachers. It is well known that it does not furnish the 
pupils with the higher studies or much culture. Its aim is to 
show them how to teach, and not to supply them with what to 
teach. If we should, on the other ha. id, attempt to enlarge the 
curriculum, and give a higher degree of culture, we should in- 
fringe on the province of state colleges and universities. It is 
to-day in that awkward dilemma from which it hopes sometime 
to be rescued. It is plain that teaching even in our lower depart- 
ments requires more education and culture than our high schools 
afford. "Teachmg," says Dr. Payne, "belongs to the higher 
category of intellectual employments involving broad scholarship, 



Education. 69 

nice discrimination and the highest gifts of mind and heart. The 
knowledge which a teacher is expected to have of the workings 
of the pupil's mind and the best method to be used for its de- 
velopment is abstruse and difficult of attainment, demanding 
qualities of mind and educational acquirement that are far higher 
than the ordinary and call for thorough training as well as consid- 
erable pedagogical instruction." 

This suggests the still further question, what these pedagog- 
ical principles are. Old-fashioned schoolmasters reduced them 
to two, namely, repetition and memory. They thought their 
pupils were making commendable progress when they could 
repeat their lessons by rote. School books were prepared with 
a view to this method, ' ' and even the rules of grammar, ' ' in the 
words of another, "were put into verse to facilitate the process." 
Whilst this was the plan in vogue reason was largely, if not al- 
together, ignored, and the only stay and encouragement of the 
flagging memory was the birch. This plan was carried to such 
extremes as reached in time real absurdity. But a remedy for it 
was not so easily found. The first one suggested was fully as 
bad as the error it was intended to correct. Efforts were put 
forth to relieve the memory of a great part of its work, not by 
calling in the aid of any other faculty, but by external 
help, such as keys to arithmetic, and lyatin school-books with in- 
terlinear translations. It was not long before it was discovered 
that this was a worse method than that which it proposed to 
mend. For a time the pupils seemed to make commendable 
progress, but they finally broke down altogether. The memory 
was taken by the shoulders and lifted bodily over \\s first difficul- 
ties, because too feeble to encounter any; by such delicate treat- 
ment and the habit of walking with crutches, its limbs were par- 
alyzed, audit became a cripple for life. In consequence of this, 
the memory lost its former reputation. Stories of its feats in 



yo Prockkdings of the^ C01.1.KGK Section. 

other days began to seem apocryphal; and the next step was to 
discard it altogether. 

The reaction which took place in the theory of repetition and 
memory was followed by the age of reason, when everything was 
addressed to the understanding. The school-room was invaded 
by philosophers; and instead of the knowledge of things the rea- 
sons for them were exacted of the opening mind. Arguments 
were to be framed before the pupil had possession of the material 
to argue with. The absurdity of this plan may not have appeared 
to its framers, but it did to those who undertook to execute it. 

Happily the reign of infant philosophers is largely, if not 
wholly, over. A better day has dawied. The conclusion has, 
at last, been reached that children are not memories with material 
attachments to be impressed with the rod; that they are not born 
logicians with capacities for reasoning without data; but human 
beings with souls of the same kind as those of adults, only un- 
developed, comprehending the faculties of memory, reason, sen- 
sation and emotion which, in order to be rightly educated, must 
be educated together; that they are also moral as well as intellect- 
ual beiiigs; and that they have bodies upon the health of which 
depends, to a great degree, the progress of the whole. 

The conception of education which is becoming general in 
our day, assumes that the what and the how of teaching must be 
adapted to the capability of the pupils, that they must be 
changed as those capabilities grow ; that they must follow the 
order of the activity of the mental powers ; that they must aim 
at a harmonious development of the whole man ; and that all this 
is to be done by occasioning the quickening of the activity of the 
pupil's mind. Consequently, a course of early training should 
include all the departments of elementary knowledge in order to 
give the mind a harmonious development, thus preparing it to 
acquire all kinds of knowledge and to resist the narrowing ten- 



Education. 7 1 

dencies of the occupation in which he shall be engaged in after 
life. 

The only other point connected with education which I shall 
mention is its relation to religion. Can the youth of the land be 
prepared to perform their full duty as citizens and members of 
society without the aid of religious principles and precepts ? This 
is the grave question of the day. It is that which is threatening 
the permanency of the public school system and the peace of our 
country. It is a matter of history that it has been thought 
through the ages that education and religion are one and indivis- 
ible. This opinion is not the offspring of superstition and igno- 
rance, but a logical deduction from the nature of the object to be 
educated, the means of education, and the facts of experience. 
The object to be developed and trained is the mind. This is not 
a w^ell- watered garden, divided into grass-plots, parterres, and 
flower-beds that are sufficiently independent of each other to ad- 
mit of different cultivators of the soil, diversities of seed, and 
various modes of irrigation. Nor is it, like the human body, en- 
dowed with organs so remotely connected wdth each other as to 
allow^ of the training of one or two without materially affecting oth- 
ers. The soul is a unit. Its faculties are not distinct and independ- 
ent entities, but modes of operation. They are placed so closely to- 
gether that no one can materially and permanently affect one with- 
out influencing the others. It is impossible to enlighten the under- 
standing without increasing the sensitiveness of the conscience; to 
influence the will without training the emotions and the affections; 
to increase the power of the memory without quickening the 
consciousness which takes cognizance of the facts of experience ; 
and to develop properly the intellectual powers without cultivating 
the moral. To attempt this would be to neglect the man himself 
and train some of his powers; to arrest every process of thought 
before reaching its legitimate conclusion and do violence to the 
reasoning powers. Every line of true knowledge finds its com- 



72 Prockkdings of thk C01.1.EGE Section. 

pleteness in the great First Cause, even as every beam of daylight 
leads the eye to the sun. 

The means of education are so interwoven that no power on 
earth can separate them. Schools can not be carried on without 
discipline, but discipline must be based on right and wrong. 
What is the standard ? Rewards and punishments are resorted to 
everywhere as incentives to study, but these derive their value 
from merit and demerit; what lies at their foundation ? History 
must be taught, or we shall separate ourselves from the past with 
its manifold valuable lessons, but how can the history of Conti- 
nental Europe be taught without explaining the revival of letters 
and the Reformation of the sixteenth century ? Who could teach 
the growth and great power of England without saying something 
about the religion of the people ? It would be impossible to tell 
the descendants of the Huguenots, whence their ancestors came, 
and how it happened that they left sunny France for the wilds of 
North Carolina, without referring to the Edict of Nantes and the 
massacre of St. Bartholomew. No fair-minded scientist could un- 
dertake to expound the theories entertained concerning the origin 
of the globe without calling his pupil's attention to that contained 
in the Mosaic cosmogony. Would any man worthy to be intrust- 
ed with the education of immortal beings attempt to explain the 
origin of the^-ace without intimating that it had been held for six 
thousand years that God created man in his own image ? These 
things cannot be separated. The truths of the Christian religion 
are so pervading, so closely connected with morality, so inter- 
woven with social and civil polity, and so diffused through all lit- 
erature that it can not be banished from our schools. 

Then the facts of experience abundantly show that the sepa- 
ration of religion from education involves positive evil to society. 
The effort in France, Holland, Great Britain and America to ex- 
clude the Bible from the common schools is a step towards bring- 
ing up in infidelity and atheism all that part of the population 



Education. 73 

dependent on those schools for their education. For, " a choice 
here," as another has said, "is not between rehgiou and no 
religion, but between religion and irreligion, between Christianity 
and infidelity. The mere negative of theism is atheisin. There 
is no middle ground between them. This is the view taken of it 
by Daniel Webster in his great speech on Girard College. " It is 
all idle," he remarks, "it is a mockery and an insult to common 
sense, to maintain that a school for the instruction of youth from 
which Christian instruction by Christian teachers is sedulously and 
vigorously shut out, is not deistical and infidel in its purpose and 
tendency . ' ' Dr. Miner, another authority on educational matters,, 
says, " it is one of the most remarkable phenomena of our per- 
verted humanity that among a Christian people and in a Protes- 
tant land, such a decision as whether the education of youth may 
not be secularized, should not seem as absurd as to inquire 
whether school-rooms should be located under water or in dark- 
some caverns." 

At no time and by no nation, until recently, was separation of 
education and religion thought to be possible, " In what age, by 
what sect, where, when, by whom," asks Mr. Webster, "has 
religious truth been excluded from the education of youth ? No- 
where, never," is his emphatic reply. " Everywhere and at all 
times it has been regarded essential, for religion is of the essence 
and vitality of useful instruction. ' ' 

Whilst the great majority of the people of France, Holland, 
Great Britain and the United States admit all that has been said, 
yet the fact remains that the public school education in all these 
countries is rapidly becoming secularized. The instruction of the 
young is passing from the church to the state. It promises to be 
ere long one of the functions of the latter. In a country like ours, 
where a large number of conflicting creeds are cherished, it is the 
duty of the civil authorities to devise an educational system that 
will not interfere with the rights nor clash with the religious views 



74 Prockkdings of thk C01.1.FGK Skction. 

of those interested in tlie subject. Simple justice shows that the 
state cannot tax parents for the support of schools that teach doc- 
trines which they do not believe, or compel children to attend 
upon a course of instruction which they abhor. A large number 
of the tax-payers and supporters of our public schools believe, on 
the other hand, that education unsupported by the principles of 
religion, must be of little value. What, then, is to be done ? 
Will the parents who are the natural guardians of the children 
and who are consequently primarily responsible for their education 
and training undertake the task in primitive style and teach them 
everything they choose ? This is not practicable and the state can 
not afford to leave the education of its citizens in uncertainty. 
Will the church, the next party responsible for the education of 
the young, undertake the work ? She has not the means neces- 
sary to do it well. She can not compel attendance, or claim, as 
her own, multitudes of children that are to be educated. In self- 
defence, therefore, the state must see that all her citizens receive a 
sufficient amount of education to perform their civil duties. 

Here arises the most difficult educational question of our day. 
How can we preserve our public school system, and yet meet the 
demands of multitudes of Christian parents and the claims of the 
different branches of the Christian church ? The division of the 
school funds is not to be thought of. The complete secularization 
of public instruction, on the other hand, would be an outrage to 
which the majority of our people will never submit, What then ? 
The issue is squarely before us. Shall not concessions be made 
that will prove satisfactory to both sides ? Does the religious 
party ask too much of the state when it demands the introduction 
of ethics into its curriculum ? This is not religion but philosophy; 
the source of its principles is not the Christian Scriptures, but the 
human constitution and that of society at large. Since the Bible^ 
as the Supreme Court of Wisconsin has recently and justly de- 
clared, is not sectarian, or the religious creed of any denomination, 



Education. 75 

but a thesaurus of tbe highest ethical principles known to the 
world, why may it not be read in all our schools ? Is the state, 
on the other hand, asking too much of parents, when it tells them 
to see to the religious part of their children's education at home ? 
or of the church, when it offers her an opportunity to send men at 
stated times, as in England, to furnish her youth with the religious 
instruction she wishes them to have ? May not an adjustment of 
this sort serve to keep our public school system from injury, and 
meet, at the same time, the views, and satisfy the conscientious 
scruples, of those who do not believe in the possibility of divorcing 
religion and education without disastrous results ? The solution 
of this question demands all the sagacity of our best statesmen, 
all the discretion of the leaders of public opinion, all the skill of 
our educators, and all the Christian forbearance of every branch 
of the Church of Christ in our land. 



76 Proceedings op the Coli<ege Section. 



PURPOSES OF THE STUDY OF LATIN. 

BY NATHANIKI. BUTl^BR, JR., A. M., PROFESSOR OF I,ATIN, UNIVERSITY 
OE II^LINOIS, CHAMPAIGN. 

Has the study of lyatin any legitimate place in a course of 
training and instruction adapted to the needs of the present time? 
That question can hardly be decided on the authority of those who 
have entered into its discussion, because on both sides are found 
men with equal claim to respectful hearing. That the study has 
a value no one denies; but those who advise that it be dropped 
claim that other studies are valuable in the same directions and 
for the same purposes, and that these others have, in addition, 
practical and scientific values, by virtue of which they should 
altogether displace the study of lyatin. 

If I^atin is to hold its place, this claim must be met, and it 
must be shown that the study is valuable, not only in a general 
way, as many other studies are valuable, as a tonic and invigor- 
ator of the mind, but that this study has a function in education 
peculiar to itself, and that its removal from the courses of the 
schools would leave those courses incomplete. 

I believe that this is true. Freely admitting that we do not 
live in a literary age; that the spirit of the time is scientific, prac- 
tical, realistic; and that the demands made upon educated men 
are very different from those made even twenty-five years ago, 
still it is my belief that the study of lyatin is an important factor 
in the preparation of men and women for these very demands. 

We maintain this view without in any sense arraying our- 
selves against the spirit of the time. We must all rejoice in the 
"new education.'* We should have no wish to recall days the 



Purposes of thb Study of IvATin. 77 

when it was believed that classical education was the only educa- 
tion. The splendid revelations of the sciences, the countless ben- 
efits they have conferred upon human life, the extent to which 
they have made us masters of the world about us, and familiar 
with the worlds above us, the influence qf scientific study in un- 
folding and stimulating the mind of the student and the investiga- 
tor — all these attest, that outside the realm of classical literature a 
field is open for the human mind in which its activity may have 
full play, its powers be taxed to the utmost, and in which it may 
secure results of the highest practical value. We should not wish 
to restrain men and women from entering this field. Its labors 
are noble, the results are tangible and important, the rewards are 
immediate. It is natural and right that men and women should 
incline toward it. It is also right and natural that courses of 
study intended to prepare men and women for such activity should 
aim to embrace whatever is especially helpful, and to exclude 
whatever has no direct part to play in fitting the student for what 
is before him. Every study that holds a place in the curriculum 
should be made to stand, and show cause why it should not be re- 
moved. 

It is well for us to remember, however, in passing upon the 
various studies, that while the times make many new demands 
upon young men and women, it is, after all, men and women that 
are needed, and not merely human machines; that the grand 
results to which science points with just pride, wrought as they 
were by mechanical skill and technical knovf ledge, were not 
wrought by mechanical skill and technical knowledge alone, but 
by these directed by clearness of thought and accuracy of judg- 
ment. It has been well said that even an engine is b?ains and 
iron. Some things which are neither directly mxcchanical nor 
directly technical may be important elements of a mechanical or 
technical education. For success in a specialty there are certain 
things which a man must master, not directly connected with that 



78 Procei^dings of the; C01.1.KGE; Skction. 

specialty — things which underlie every specialty, just as sound 
phj^sical health underlies all physical activity. 

It is the purpose of this paper to show what, in the opinion 
of the writer, are the results to be gained in the study of lyatin, 
and thus, if possible, 4:0 answer the question, ''Shall we retain 
I^atin in our modcrri courses of study ? " It is not intended to 
enter upon an exhaustive discussion of this study, but only to call 
attention to some of its more practical and immediate uses — uses 
which nothing else so well fulfills. I wish to dwell upon three 
points: Firsts the relation of the study of Lyatin to command of 
English. Second^ the relation of the study of I^atin to the scien- 
tific habit of mind. Third, the value of the matter, the substance, 
the thought, contained in the Lyatin classics. 

I . Regarding the mastery of English, then, we shall all agree 
that whatever a man's work maybe, he can hardly stand in greater 
need of anything than the ability to use his own language with 
ease and exactness — to say readily, naturally, and clearly what he 
means. Not merely for the needs of the editor, the author, the 
professional man, but for the every-day uses of life, the purposes 
of correspondence, or of ordinary verbal interchange of thought, 
mastery of one's own language is a most practical and necessary 
accomplishment. I do not refer, at this point, to familiarity with 
the subject of English literature, as such, nor of English philol- 
ogy, but to the mastery of English as an instrument of every-day 
practical use — the mastery of the art of transferring thought from 
mind to mind by means of clear and simple speech. 

This art is almost as rare as it is necessary. One has only to 
have a large general correspondence, or to read our daily prints, or 
to listen to the average public speaker, to realize the painful lack of 
the simple qualities of clearness and completeness in the thought 
and speech of men. It is as rare as it is refreshing to find a tnan 
or woman whose sentences are natural and at the same time per- 
fectly clear and complete. The mistakes, misunderstandings. 



PURPOSKS OF THE) STUDY OF LATIN. 79 

blunders, in affairs ranging in importance from the arrangement 
of the household to the running of railway trains, are largely due 
to the lack of clear and precise interchange of thought between 
man and man. Whether a man directs a gang of laborers or 
stands in a pulpit, or controls the movements of an army, or man- 
ages a commercial business, no accomplishment is more needful 
than that of habitual clearness of thought and expression. It is a 
just remark of a recent writer in the Atlantic Monthly that " there 
is no pursuit in which an American does not often need to use 
English easily and well." 

It is the gaining of this practical accomplishment, the fuller 
mastery of the art of language, which, in my judgment, is one of 
the chief purposes to be secured in the study of lyatin. And it is 
at precisely this point that the study of classics (both L^atin and 
Greek) has been most sharply assailed. Mr. Charles Francis 
Adams, in his famous Phi Beta Kappa address, complains that he 
and his contemporaries at Harvard, though students of lyatin and 
Greek, were not trained to follow out a line of sustained, close 
thought, and to express themselves in clear, concise terms. They 
were trained neither to speak nor to express thought. A similar 
complaint is made by a writer in the North American Review^ 
who charges that among the products of the American classical 
system it is difficult to find one writer ' ' who has learned to drape 
the graceful garment of language around the firm body of an 
idea." (Clarence King, North American Review, October, 1888). 
Both these writers, however, make the methods, not the study, 
the object of attack. And it must be confessed that the complaint 
is largely just. Certainly in my time at college, the study of Latin 
consisted mainly in committing to memory lists of rules and 
exceptions in the grammar, and then puzzling out at hap-hazard 
a certain amount of Latin text each day, not for the purpose of 
reading the author with some intelligent grasp of his thought, 
nor for drill in making good English sentences, but chiefly for 



8o Proceedings of the Coi.i.ege Section. 

applying the rules of grammar. I remember distinctly that, in 
reading Caesar or Cicero, I carried along from day to day no idea 
of connected narrative or argument. I might just as well 
have been digging out a section of Caesar on one day, of Nepos 
the next, of Sallust the third, and the next day of lyivy. The 
problem was simply and only this, to puzzle some I^atin sentences 
into Knglish, and then, as the supreme end of study, tack to each 
word and clause the suitable grammatical label. The grammar 
was not looked upon as an aid to reading the author, but the 
author was regarded as a convenient means of applying grammat- 
ical rules. We utterly failed to catch the spirit of the author; 
our translations had no life and little sense. We were not study- 
ing the art of language; much less were we studying literature; 
we studied grammatical analysis. The method was wrong, and 
it was paralyzing to thought and expression. Mr. Clarence King 
has well said that " a free and joyous flow of language, the subtle 
ceremony of marrying words to ideas so that they forever go hand 
in hand as one, can no more be learned by grammatical analysis, 
than the secret of life can be learned among the severed fragments 
in a dissecting room." But this very writer touches the root of 
the matter when, avowing his respectful devotion to classic letters 
and arts, he says, " it is only the American 7net/iod thai he laments 
and pities." If the ends proposed have been mainly committing 
to memory lists of rules and exceptions in the grammars, and 
guessing at the meaning of the text for the one purpose of apply- 
ing the rules after the sense has been guessed out, — if these have 
been the ends in view, who can wonder that the results were real 
harm to the student, and that the methods have fallen under the 
condemnation of thoughtful men ? 

But taught as it should be, learned as it ought to be, I 
believe that there is no instruction better than Latin for the 
mastery of the art of language in general and of the English lan- 
guage in particular. 



Purposes of the Study of I^atin. 8i 

Consider for a moment the material about wbich the mind 
occupies itself in the study of lyatiu. Here we have the language 
and literature of a people whose characteristics were law, order, 
discipline — a people who were eminently direct and practical. 
These traits, of course, impressed themselves upon the language 
they spoke. Accordingly, we find the Latin style marked by 
order, exactness, completeness. Every word, every phrase, every 
clause has a definite function, a clear relation. Kven though the 
sentence be long and involved, it is complete and its structure per- 
fect. The problem of the student is to catch tiie precise meaning 
of the sentence and to express that meaning in equivalent 
Knglisli; to make the English sentence say just what the lyatin 
says, and to say it as well as the Latin said it. The performance 
of this task requires clearness, accuracy, and completeness both in 
understanding and in expression. The student who, day by 
day, is turning the pages of Cicero or Horace into the very best 
English at his command, who has learned to handle with ease 
one of Caesar's page-long sentences, or to complete Juvenal's 
ellipses, who has learned to translate Latin authors idiomatically, 
fluently, has enjoyed a very special kind of training in the arts of 
clear thinking and speaking. Good English is not a science to 
be learned from books on rhetoric; it is an art to be mastered by 
use. The student of Latin is daily making English sentences 
with admonitions in every Latin sentence against the very faults 
he is most in need of correcting. He is daily learning, in the 
most practical way, to do just what Mr. Adams complains he was 
not trained to do: to " follow out a line of sustained, close thought, 
expressing himself in clear, concise terms." 

This point is well made by Cruttwell, in his " History oi 
Roman Literature. " "The utility of Roman literature," says 
he, '* may be sought in the practical standard of its thought, and 
in the almost faultless correctness of its composition. * * * The 
latter excellence fits it above all for an educational use. There is 



82 Prockbdings op th^ CoivIvEgk section. 

probably no language which in that respect comes near to it. * * 
Among Roman classical authors, scarce a sentence can be detected 
which offends against logical accuracy, or defies critical analj^sis. 
In this respect lyatin authors stand alone." Even Greek is 
different. ' ' The powerful intellect of an ^^schj^lus or a Thucyd- 
ides did not prevent them from transgressing laws which in 
their day were undiscovered, and which their own writings helped 
to form. Nor in modern times could we find a single language 
in which the idioms of the best writers could be reduced to con- 
formity with strict rule. French, which at first sight seems to 
offer such an instance, is seen, on a closer view, to be fuller of 
illogical idioms than anj^ other language. * 5i< * English, 
at least in its older forms, abounds in special idioms, and German 
is still less likely to be adduced. As long, therefore, as penetrat- 
ing insight into syntax [sentence structure] is considered desirable, 
so long will lyatin offer the best field for obtaining it." 

That this result may be accomplished, let the student of Lat- 
in understand that he is studying the practical art of language, 
and not the science of grammar. Let his attention be fixed upon 
the task of catching the author's meaning, and so rendering it 
that it shall make the same impression on the English mind that 
it did on that of a Roman. Let him understand that it is for this 
very purpose that he needs a most thorough knowledge of the 
grammar. Thus it will be to him a 2vorki?ig knowledge and not a 
merely theoretical. The forms of words must be recognized at 
sight, the syntax of the language must be completelj' understood, 
and the unceasing grammatical drill required will do the student 
no harm, if he is made to see in it, not an end in itself, but a 
means of reading the literature. 

The most serious complaint against classical study has arisen 
from a strange and unnatural reversing of this principle. When 
a slone building is to be erected, the stones are prepared at a 
quarry, often thousands of miles away. But they are sent to the 



Purposes of the Study of IvATin. 83 

place where the building is to stand, each bearing a mark for the 
guidance of the builder, telling him just what part each has in 
the structure. The syntax of each stone is plainly marked upon 
it. Now suppose that the builder utterly disregards these marks, 
and falls to work to find out the place of each stone by trying it 
here and trying it there, and guessing and inferring as best he 
can. That would represent the way in which much of our 
translation used to be done. But, worse than that. After the 
builder has guessed his building together let him then be required 
to take it down, piece by piece, and explain the marks on the 
stones — marks which he has never thought of noticing while he 
was putting up the house. He explains the characters, leaves the 
stones scattered about, and goes on to undertake a new contract. 
So with the I^atin student, studying after the old system. He 
guesses his sentence together, and then breaks it up in order to ex- 
plain the marks that are on every word for his guidance. This is 
to reverse the process and defeat the ends of language study. We 
should train our pupils to use their knowledge of etymology and 
syntax, not for analysis, but for synthesis, not for taking the sen- 
tence apart, but for putting the sentence together. The student's 
knowledge of grammar, after the first year, should avail him the 
instant he encounters a sentence, and not only after he has puzzled 
out the meaning. The grammar should be his guide to an intel- 
ligent reading of the author, and not a tax upon memory or inge- 
nuity. The sight of an iit or a cum, a si or a quod at the beginning 
of a clause, the sight of a subjunctive or an infinitive, an accusa- 
tive or an ablative, should be his clue to the sense. Trained in 
this way the pupil will see that a Latin sentence is not to be 
guessed out by a more or less ingenious combination of the 
words, but that he is to read it as a Roman boy read it, 
from the first word to the last in the Roman order. 
There should be no picking out the words, no changing of 



84 Procbe^dings of thk C01.1.KGK Skction. 

the original order. The forms of the words are to show the reader 
their relations and meaning. In this way he feels that he is in 
contact with the mind of his author, he catches his spirit, and the 
drudgery of translation is changed to a positive pleasure. 

Of course this translating in the I^atin order is only for the 
first reading, in which the purpose is to catch the precise thought 
and sentiment of the author; it will then be in order to turn into 
equivalent idiomatic English. 

If I^atin be read in this way the study will no longer be 
chargeable with concerning itself only to train the memory by 
learning rules and exceptions in the grammars. For such reading 
of I^atin taxes continually the student's power of accurate obser- 
vation; it calls for a strong and commanding use of intelligent 
judgment; it trains him to the habit of clear and sustained thought, 
and of simple and complete expression. He is really using his 
mind in a way to make him respect himself and the literature he 
studies. Read in this way, I believe that lyatin can do for a boy's 
English what nothing else can do. Better than anything else it 
will teach him the art of sentence-making. 

I have tried to point out that Eatin is especially fitted for an 
instrument of training in the use of English, because of its won- 
derfully perfect sentence structure, its style being such as is most 
sure to impress on the style of the student the characters of clear- 
ness, accuracy, and completeness. But besides this perfect sen- 
tence structure, Eatin has another and perhaps even more direct 
relation to the student's practical understanding, and working 
knowledge of English. There is an important sense in which 
Eatin itself is not a dead language. It has modern and present 
uses. It is the mother tongue of the languages of Southwestern 
Europe. It furnishes forty-five per cent, of the words in our own 
language. A very large proportion of the words used in scien- 
tific nomenclature are directly from the Eatin. A knowledge of 
Eatin has, therefore, a direct bearing upon the mastery of some of 



PuRPOSKS OF THK Study of IvATin. 85 

the most important of the languages now spoken b}^ civilized peo- 
ples. Of course, if one desires a speaking knowledge of a lan- 
guage he should live where that language is spoken. But there 
can scarcely be better preparation for a thoroughly intelligent 
reading acquaintance with the languages of modern Southern Bu- 
rope than thorough study of lyatin. I speak of this because a read- 
ing knowledge of these languages is now regarded as a necessary 
part of a practical education. 

But I am chiefly concerned with L^atin as related to Knglish. 
In addition, then, to its use in promoting clearness of thought 
and expression in sentence construction, I mention again the fact 
that of the words in the English dictionary, forty-five per cent, 
are of Latin origin. This proportion does not include such terms 
— which are nevertheless thoroughly adopted into our family — as 
caveat^ ex post facto, retroactive, sine die, habeas corpus, ipse dixit, 
ipso facto, in toto, sub rosa; besides these, many words have come 
into English without change. ' ' Candidate, " " suffrage, " " legal, ' ' 
* ' legitimate, " " veto, " " civil, " " suburban, " " confiscate, ' ' are 
e:5^mples of a large class of words that are equally Latin and 
English. It is self-evident that a man who has become sensitive 
to the force and meaning of such words in the original will use 
them with greater intelligence and effectiveness in his own 
language. 

But, more than this : Latin words are built up from roots and 
stems by a regular process which the student can easily learn, so 
that the very form of the word has a meaning in the English 
derivative that it has in the Latin original. Thus he learns that 
the ending -arium denotes a place where something is found or 
kept. Knowing that liber means a book he has no need to look 
in the lexicon to know that librarium means a place where books 
are kept. In the same way he knows at a glance that apiarium 
is a place for bees ; aviarium, a place for birds ; aquarium, a 
water- tank. Thus he finds himself recognizing the fundamental 



86 Prockejdings of thk C01.1.KGE Skction. 

meaning of familiar words. Librarium becomes "library"; 
aviarium^ ' ' aviary ' ' ; aquarium is transferred to Knglish 
unchanged. The syllable -or^ applied to a certain part of the 
verb, denotes the doer of the act. Knowing this he feels at once 
the force of this ending applied : ago, * ' I do " ; oro^ ' ' I speak ' ' ; 
imitor, ' ' I imitate ' ' ; giving the I^atin words — which are English 
as well — ' ' actor, " * ' orator, " " imitator. ' ' When he has learned 
that the ending -tas or -itas denotes an abstract noun, he needs no 
lexicon to inform him that honestas means ' ' honesty ' ' ; Veritas, 
' ' verity ' ' ; cBquitas, ' 'equity ' ' ; and the peculiar force of these 
English abstracts is familiar to him, as he involuntarily associates 
them with the adjectives from which they are derived. The list 
might be indefinitely prolonged of English words whose very 
form displays their force and meaning in a way that cannot be 
understood or felt by one not familiar with I^atin. Word-study, 
and especially tracing the line from lyatin words to their English 
progeny, should form a prominent feature of the study of I^atin. 
It opens up the real treasures of English as nothing else can do. 
It never fails to interest ; and, while it enriches the student's 
knowledge of English, it also bears directly upon ease in reading 
the literature ; for, in giving him a working vocabulary, it does 
away with the necessity of constantly turning the leaves of the 
lexicon — a tax upon the attention and a waste of time. 

2. In addition to what has been said of the value of Latin, 
resulting from its perfect sentence structure, and from the extent 
to which it enters into modem European languages, into the lan- 
guage of science, and into the English vocabulary, I wish to say 
a word about the value of the study in establishing the scientific 
habit of mind, of which we hear so much nowadays — that is to 
say, the habit of exact observation and correct inference — a habit 
needful in every science, and, indeed, in every relation of life. 
For this purpose the study is useful from the day when it is begun 
by the lad of twelve or thirteen. At the very outset he learns that 



Purposes of thb Study of Latin. 87 

regi7ia means one thing, that reginam means another, that regi-^ 
narum means still another. He learns that laudo has a different 
meaning from laudavit, and so on. He sees that the root of the 
word does not change, but that syllables joined to the root do 
change, and that he must judge the meaning of the word by noting 
these added syllables. He begins at the very outset to observe 
and to infer. But further, the lyatin has, as we have already said, 
a remarkable system of word building. Certain word roots are 
capable of many modifications of meaning through the attachment 
of significant endings. The mastery of these significant endings 
is not diflEcult; and while their ultimate use is to assist the reader, 
by displaying the meaning of the word the instant the eye falls 
upon it, yet that very perception of the meaning trains in the 
habit of accurate observation and correct inference. lyatin word- 
building is just as much a science as is zoology or chemistry. 
Properly conducted, it establishes the same habit of mind. The 
same is true of word-inflections. The boy who is learning to 
recognize the marks of case, number, mood, and tense, or to per- 
ceive the force of significant derivative endings, is going through 
precisely the same mental process as when he classifies minerals 
or shells, or names his botanical specimens at sight. This sort of 
training is most important during the first two years of the study 
of Latin, at a time before the student has begun science; and in 
this way boys of thirteen to sixteen may be led to form habits 
that will be most useful to them when they reach the work of the 
laboratory. I have made actual and repeated test of the validity 
of this claim for Latin by appeals to the experience of professors 
and students in our scientific courses, and I am satisfied that it 
constitutes one of the strongest arguments in favor of that study. 
This, too, I set over against Mr. Adams' objection that the classics 
failed to train the powers of observation — an objection that was 
doubtless just, as urged against the system prevalent in his college 
days. Of the importance of this early systematic training Presi- 



88 Proce^kdings of the CoIvIvEGK Section. 

dent Hyde, of Bowdoin College, says in the December (li 
Atlantic Monthly. "The chief value of a classical [preparatory] 
course lies not in what its students know when they graduate, but 
in what it enables them to learn afterward. * * * its aim is 
to form right mental habits. It insists on accuracy, thoroughness 
and form." 

This scientific word-study, like the study of syntax and the 
tracing of Knglish derivatives, gives the student a familiar work- 
ing knowledge of the language, and so leads directly to ease and 
sympathy in translation. This result should appear early. If the 
right method is employed from the first, the student ought, after 
the beginning of the Freshman year, to be able to read with relish 
the authors of the classical period, as they come in course; and 
his evident pleasure, the activity of his mind, and his steadily-in- 
creasing command of English, gained in daily translation, would 
set at rest all doubts about the utility of the study. 

3. I do not mean to speak at length of the value of I^atin 
literature as literature— of the value of what is here offered to the 
thought and feeling of the student. Its value is recognized, and 
if it has not been felt — if the thought and feeling of the student 
have not been kindled — we must again say that the fault has lain 
in the method which has pointed the student to the grammar and 
not to the literature. Not by chance have these writings sur- 
vived. They are literature in the highest sense. As Simcox has 
pointed out, ' ' the Latin authors wrote under a strong regard for 
all that tends to promote fellow feeling among mankind. Latin lit- 
erature throughout assumes and enforces social rights and duties. ' ' 
The Romans were, among the nations of history, pre-eminently 
practical. They were the traders, politicians, law- makers of the 
time, and as such easily the peers of moderns. The lives and 
writings of Cicero, Cato, Gracchus, Crassus, are full of lessons 
for our own times. The tone of Roman literature is essentially 
modern, and highly stimulating to the modern mind. Horace is 



Purposes of the Study of Latin. 89 

greater than Pope; Juvenal is more stimulating than Swift; 
Tacitus- is as refined as Irving; and it may be doubted whether 
Grant or Sherman will ever be read and admired by so many as 
Caesar. It is hardly necessary to call attention to the develop- 
ment which the student's judgment must receive in passing upon 
the character of Roman society, culture, and politics, from which 
modern times have received so large an inheritance. It is taken 
for granted that this w^ill follow an intelligent reading of the text; 
that when the student has fully grasped the author's meaning he 
will be encouraged to criticise, to commend or condemn, and that 
he will be directed to collateral reading. 

No, not only because of its value as language study, not only 
for its value as an instrument for training, but because of what it 
can do for thought and feeling, we cannot afford to spare Roman 
literature from the curriculum. There is in it a freshness, a sin- 
cerity, a genuineness, which it is most helpful to touch. It is this 
that we love, it is this that helps us in Chaucer and in Shakespeare, 
and in every singer or prophet. Horace, Virgil, Juvenal, Persius, 
Tacitus, all have it. Let the student feel it, become acquainted 
with it, catch it. It has for us what we need in these days along with 
our intense absorption in the real. This age of railways and 
bridges, of machinery and tools, is a glorious age. This mag- 
nificent building, flooded at night with the splendor of the day, 
these wonderful means of travel and communication all about us, 
tell their own story. Yet these grand results exist for what is 
grander than them all — men and women. Let us never reverse 
this truth, and suppose that we were made for these things. They 
were made for us; and nothing should we less desire than that 
our children become alive to the things about them and dead to 
the world wdthin them. Let us exalt and teach the knowledge of 
this material world, but never let us forget the yet higher world 
of mind and character. Some one has well said, " I would rather 
my son thought that the sun goes round the earth, than that he 



go Proceedings op the College Section. 

be devoid of high thought, noble impulse, true feeling." 
We are sometimes told that action, not thought and feel- 
ing are the true end of man. True. But also fruits, not 
roots, are the true end of an orchard. Yet we can have no fruits 
without roots. No, we commit a fallacy when we array the 
worker against the thinker, when we talk about acts rather 
than thoughts. The union of the two can alone be 
fruitful. The two elements must go hand in hand. If we would 
avoid a narrow and defective culture, we must learn to call 
practical that which trains to right habits of thought and feeling, 
as well as that which trains to the right use of hand and eye. 

This seems to be the view ot the most thoughtful advocates of 
the ' ' New Education, ' ' as distinguished from the ' ' Old Education. ' ' 
Mr. Charles Francis Adams, already quoted, says explicitly: " I am 
no believer in that narrow scientific and technological training 
which now and again we hear extolled. A practical and too often 
a mere vulgar money-making utility seems to be its natural out- 
come. " -In the same line, a recent writer in the New York Inde- 
pendent, referring to the new methods of classical teaching — 
methods pointing the student to natural and familiar acquaintance 
with his author, instead of filling him with fear of the grammar 
— goes on to say: ** And this will mean the permanence of the 
classics in their commanding position in the schools. Labored 
methods and halting, meager results, have been the main argu- 
ments against these studies." But these methods may be cor- 
rected so that * ' to the discipline that seems to belong preemi- 
nently to classical study, may be added this advantage of a perma- 
nent familiarity with noble and ennobling literature." And, 
finally, Mr. King, in the North American Review, writing in 
derision of the old-time classical course, declares the classics, 
both Greek and lyatin, capable of performing the highest educa- 
tional function when he says: '' Ours is a vulgar but remarkably 
active civilization, given over for the most part to the energetic 



Purposes of thk Study of Latin. 91 

pursuit of personal prosperit}^ and the struggle for material good. 
Of all ages and lands this is the one where, for the mind's and 
soul's sake, a brilliant struggle must be made to stem the almost 
irresistible current of sodden materialism. After that highest of 
all ideals and idealizing forces, a pure and spiritual religion, there 
is nothing comparable to the classics for the exaltation of in- 
tellectual and artistic standards, which forever transcend that 
crushed, distorted, warped and blasted thing, that sweet, splen- 
did, grotesque, droll, dreadful thing — the real." 

*' Taught as they might be, learned as they should be, so that 
not the mechanism of dialects only, but the splendid ideality of 
antique thought and feeling, may become a part of the young 
nation, the lofty classics of the Greeks and Romans can be made 
of inestimable value in the creation of American character. ' ' 



92 Proceedings of the Coli,ege Section. 



THE COLLEGE PHASE OF THE NEW 
EDUCATION. 

BY REV. E. A. TANNER, D. D., PRESIDENT OF ILLINOIS COLLEGE, 

JACKSONVILLE. 

A generation, covering from thirty to thirty- three years, 
by common agreement is distributed into four periods of 
nearly equal length. The average child of seven or eight years 
has come to such practical knowledge of right and wrong, that 
we consider him accountable for his choice of good or evil, in his 
ordinary experiences. At from fourteen to sixteen, he reaches 
* puberty. This transition period the civil law recognizes as " the 
age of consent." At twenty-one, the state acknowledges man- 
hood and welcomes to all the responsibilities of citizenship. From 
that time, life, whether long or short, is an absolute individu- 
ality. I lay no great stress upon this doctrine of sevens, though 
I do believe there is in it something more than mere chance, or 
fancy. The first division comes from long experience in the moral 
training of the race. The second is the natural suggestion of 
physiology. The third is sanctioned by the teachings of psychol- 
ogy and social science. The fourth is the resultant of the other 
three. I mention this well-known distribution chiefly, however, to 
call attention to some peculiar drifts of modern thought. 

Our new theology, if self-consistent, must raise the age of 
moral responsibility^ in order to give childhood the fairest chance. 
Our new sociology demands that the age of consent shall be raised^ 
for the protection of purity. But our new education faces the 
other way, and, in the name of moral and intellectual progress, 
demands that restrictions shall be removed, and that the age of 



Thk CoLivKGi: Phase of the New Education. 93 

choice shall be lowered, so as to cover not only the courses of the 
university, but likewise all the studies of the college. 

Great confusion in discussion arises from the fact that no dis- 
tinction is drawn between the college and the university. We have 
in the United States a multitude of institutions which are colleges in 
name and in function. We have a multitude of institutions, 
which are universities in name, and colleges in function. We 
have a few institutions which are universities in name, and 
partly colleges and partly universities in function. We have not 
a single institution which is a university in name and solely a 
university in function. Johns Hopkins approaches nearest to 
this last description. She is eager to realize this ideal as soon as 
possible, but she is obliged for the present to maintain a college 
department. Johns Hopkins was founded as a pure university. 
Her trustees and faculty regard the collegiate part of their work 
as a necessary evil, from which they are to be freed at a very early 
day. Harvard and Yale were founded as colleges. They have 
made their reputation as colleges. They are passing slowly and 
reluctantly from college to university work. They still make the 
college the center of activity. But the sooner they abandon col- 
lege work and devote themselves exclusively to university work, 
the better it will be for the interests of the higher learning. 

Yale is moving so cautiously in the direction of electives, 
that she has not harmed the general cause of college education 
throughout the country. The same cannot be said of Harvard. 
The revolution which she seeks to effect, is, to obliterate every 
distinction, and to subject the whole American college system to 
the methods of the German University. She insists that the 
absolute freedom of manhood shall be given to every boy in his 
teens, who is sufficiently advanced in learning to enter the fresh- 
man class. It is true that a few of the studies of the first year 
are still required at Harvard, but it is openly proclaimed that they 
will presently disappear. 



94 Prockkdings of thk Coi^IvKGE Section. 

It is the proper province of the college to deal with immature 
young men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two. It is 
the proper province of the university to take those same young 
men, after they have reached maturity, and prepare them for their 
special work in life. We all agree that so soon as a man passes out 
of college into the university, he should be perfectly free to pursue 
any study which he may desire; that, in choosing his vocation, he 
should be at liberty to follow any line of investigatio^i which he 
deems profitable. A true university should furnish facilities for the 
mastery of any and every branch of knowledge. A true university 
should be a place for unlimited original research, and a place for 
imparting to every one who desires it, and whenever he desires it» 
the accumulated learning of all the ages. Such a university should 
say to its students, " I open to you the opportunity to enter any 
and every realm of inquiry, but I have no suggestions for your 
guidance in selection, you must take the whole responsibility for 
every choice, for your methods of study, and for your manner of 
life. You are accountable to me for nothing. I leave you to 
yourself, without a single restriction, to work out your own des- 
tiny." So far the old education and the new are in perfect 
accord. But, not content with this, the new education insists that 
the principle of unrestricted choice, which all admit should be the 
law of the university, should be carried down into the college, 
and should govern the whole curriculum. 

Now, while the old education is ready to concede that it is wise 
to admit the elective system into our colleges, it stoutly maintains 
that it is necessary to confine its workings to the upper classes, 
and to guard against its abuse even there. Conservative men be- 
lieve that a back-bone of required studies should extend through 
the curriculum, that even juniors and seniors should not be left 
wholly to themselves in their choices. But the fight waxes hottest 
over the position of the new education, that sophomores and even 
freshmen shall be permitted to study what they choose and as 



The ColIvEge Phase of the New Education. 



95 



they choose, with very little direct control by college authorities. 
Against this doctrine nian}^ of our wisest men enter a solemn pro- 
test in the name of sound morality and of liberal learning. This 
method would subvert the historic conception of the purpose of 
college training. It has been, and it should continue to be, the 
chief aim of the college, not to impart a mass of information on 
an}^ particular subject, but to discipline the intellectual faculties 
for any and every kind of activity. In the college course disci- 
pline is essential, information incidental. In the university course 
information is of primary and discipline of secondary importance. 

To give the young man this mastery of his mental powers, 
which is the function of the college, three things and three only 
are necessary. He must be taught to observe, to think and to ex- 
press his thought. He will then be ready to graduate and to en- 
ter the university, there to employ his faculties in the acquisition 
of such knowledge of a technical or professional nature as will be 
most serviceable in his chosen vocation. 

It is obvious that there is nothing else so good as the liatural 
sciences to train the powers of observation. Furthermore, a few 
of the sciences may be selected which will answer this purpose in 
all cases, as well as if every man should make his own choice. It 
is sheer nonsense to claim that, for the uses which the college 
should subserve, a wide range of electives in science is of any sub- 
stantial benefit to the student. 

In the second place, it is manifest that mathematics, leading 
to logic and psychology, must continue to be the chief reliance for 
developing the power of orderly and protracted thought. Here 
also there is not needed in the college curriculum a great variety 
of electives. 

In the third place, argument is not required to prove that the 
study of language is the natural method to acquire the power of 
expression. And the college which selects and prescribes such 
languages as experience has proved to be the best adapted to this 



96 Proceedings of the College Section. 

purpose, will do its legitimate work as a college, better than an in- 
stitution which could give its students their option among all the 
tongues of Babel. 

An institution with a faculty of ten men, with classes of mod- 
erate size and with three well-digested prescribed courses, will do 
as excellent college work, as Johns Hopkins is doing to-day with 
her seven carefully prescribed courses. Such multiplicity makes 
a great display, but for practical purposes it is worthless. Again, 
Williams College, which is comparatively poor in electives, is 
to-day, with her prescribed courses, giving her students more val- 
uable college training than is Harvard, with her bewildering pa- 
rade of electives and the almost unbounded liberty which she 
promises her youngest boys. 

The provinces of knowledge have greatly multiplied, and the 
new education claims that the demands upon the colleges have in- 
creased in the same proportion, but that claim is untenable. The 
demands upon the universities have increased in the same propor- 
tion, and they will continue so to increase. The colleges, how- 
ever, have been comparatively little affected. The universities 
must furnish new instruction in every department, but the colleges 
only need to select from many new branches here and there one, 
which is belter for discipline, or which is equally good for disci- 
pline and at the same time more valuable for information. 

Let me emphasize the idea that the liberty to choose between 
three wisely prescribed courses is, for all the legitimate purposes 
of college training, as valuable as the liberty to choose among 
thirty such courses; and that the offer of a dozen wisely selected 
electives is better than the offer of a hundred miscellaneous elect- 
ives. The simple fact is, that the wants of all minds between the 
ages of 1 8 and 22 are so nearly the same, that there is no need of 
that great diversity of full courses, or of separate studies, on which 
such stress is laid by the apostles of the new education. Let us not 
be carried away by the great parade of optionals, offered to our boys. 



The College Phase of the New Education. 97 

In the next place, the average Ireshman is not competent to 
make the best selection. He does not know what will give him 
greatest mental power, and, if he did know, he would usually 
choose, instead, that which is easiest, or that for which he has a 
passing fancy. Your boy at college is just like your boy at home. 
He needs general direction, day by day. To make him his own 
master at 17 or 18 would often be quick ruin. Though you grad- 
ually give him freer rein, would you dare to surrender all directing 
power, much before he reached his majority ? I appeal to 
the teachings of general experience in family training. The great 
secret of bringing j^our boy safely, wisely and successfully to his 
majority, is to establish in childhood a considerate but firm control 
of your will over his will, and then to relax that control little by 
little, in proportion as you discern on his part a growing ability to 
decide what is best, and a growing disposition to choose in accord- 
ance with the dictates of reason. I appeal to you who are 
householders, and who have, living at home, sons under the age of 
twenty, to know whether it is best for society, whether it is best 
for your family, whether it is best for yourselves, whether it is best 
for the young men themselves, that every restriction should be 
swept away, and that they should be left to unconditional freedom 
of choice and action. To this, sensible fathers and mothers can 
make but one answer. Now, that which is not best for those boys at 
home, is not best at college. The mere transfer from the one place to 
the other does not suddenly mature the judgment and bring deliver- 
ance from caprice and passion. A wise father will retain in his own 
hand a certain measure of authority until the son's majority, though 
the last years of that boy's minority will be chiefly self-directive. 
This general law of the household should be the general law of the 
college. Such is the harmonious teaching of common sense, 
analogy and experience. The revolution sought by the new edu- 
cation starts from first principles which are unfavorable to the 
best morals and to the soundest learning. 



98 Procekdings of the Coli^ege Section. 

As a rule, the freshman, at the age of 17 or 18, has not 
formed his plan of life. He is too young to do so wisely. His 
ruling desire is to make study as light as possible and to have as 
good a time as possible. Now, when the new education says to 
such a one: " Here are two hundred groups of studies, of which 
you must pursue only sixteen to gain your diploma ; select such 
as suit your preference ; furthermore, follow your own option 
about attending recitations ; you shall graduate if you mark 
fifty per cent, on the average, ' ' what will the average freshman do? 
It goes without saying, that he will choose those studies which are 
most to his taste, and which will cost him the least labor. You 
would have done it when a freshman. I should have done it when 
a freshman. And, again, if we had had our option about attend- 
ance, we should have gone nutting in the fall, skating in the 
winter and fishing in the spring, when we ought to have been in the 
recitation room. Out upon the notion, that the way to make a 
thinker of a thoughtless boy is to let him choose such studies as 
he pleases. Out upon the notion, that the way to make that 
unstable character stable is, to let the youth ' ' cut ' ' his recitations 
whenever he pleases. Some of the most valuable mental 
discipline in college comes from being obliged to master branches 
for which there is no natural liking. Some of the most valuable 
traits of character are the outgrowth of habits of punctualitj^ 
and orderly effort formed in obedience to college require- 
ments. What the young men of this generation need is, 
not encouragement to gratify their own fancy, and consult their 
own convenience, but to overcome the disagreeable, and to be on 
time when duty calls. First,- make sure that these practices 
have become fixed principles. Then, and not until then, is it 
expedient to introduce electives. I^et prescription govern the 
first half of the curriculum. Combine prescription with election 
during the second half, giving an ever-increasing proportion to 
election. 



Thk CoIvIvKgk Phase of the Nkw Education. 99 

" But," replies an apostle of the new education, " the experi- 
ence of Harv^ard overthrows these positions. The remarkable 
prosperity of the institution bears witness to the wisdom of the 
present method." That does not follow. Harvard has the prestige 
of two hundred and fiftj^ years. She numbers her graduates by 
thousands. She feels the mighty momentum of many genera- 
tions. The growth of her endowments and the multiplication 
of her students would have been essentially the same, under either 
the old system or the new. 

The improvement in manliness at Harvard is sometimes urged 
in favor of the new education. But there is also an improvement 
in manliness in all the colleges of the country, no matter what the 
system. Within the past two or three years I have had rare oppor- 
tunities to compare , large bodies of students at Princeton, 
Amherst, Williams, Yale, and Harvard, and I have no hesitation 
in saying, that the manliest fellows were not Harvard men. 

An enthusiastic advocate of the new system triumphantly 
parades the higher marking under the present method, as conclu- 
sive proof of its superiority. But what teacher does not know 
that marks will rise as a matter of course, wherever students are 
permitted to choose their own studies and instructors. There 
wall always be a rush to the ' ' soft ' ' branches and to the high 
markers. Nothing could be more absurd than to make a grand 
flourish over a fact so easily explained in another way. 

Once more, we are told that the average student in the upper 
classes at Harvard absents himself from only sixteen per cent, of 
his recitations. The figures are not given for the lower classes, 
in which the percentage of absences would be much higher. But, 
suppose that we should take sixteen per cent, as the average for 
the whole course, it would reveal to us this startling fact, that half 
of the students at Harvard are constantly absenting themselves 
from recitations one-sixth of the time. It may be fairly taken for 
granted that there are scores of young men in the institution 



loo Prockkdings of thk Coi^IvKGej Skction. 

who do not report for duty more than two days in three. 
Can you conceive of anything much worse in its influence 
upon scholarship and character, than the utter looseness of this 
optional theory and practice, during that period when mental and 
moral gristle is turning into bone ? Now, if you will consult the 
better colleges, where courses are prescribed, and where attend- 
ance is required, you will find that the average of absences will be 
from three to six per cent. , instead of sixteen per cent, or more. 
To which system is it safer to intrust your son at the age of seven- 
teen or eighteen ? 

These figures and arguments adduced in the name of the new 
education are the best that she has to offer. They are taken from 
statistics concerning the upper classes, where we all grant that the 
elective and optional principles should be admitted under certain 
restrictions. Concerning the lower classes, about which the chief 
conflict rages, we are offered fancies instead of figures, and assump- 
tions instead of arguments. The old education has abundantly 
proved her efficiency. She points proudly to the illustrious men 
whom she has trained for the service of the race, generation after 
generation, for centuries. There is no vocation in life which her 
sons have not adorned with splendid achievement. The 
new education has no history. She can bring forward no 
substantial evidence, until she can exhibit to us a race of grad- 
uates who are doing in the world grander work than that accom- 
plished by those who have been trained in the way of the fathers. 
We have shown the natural tendency of her method in the case 
of the immature boy. We have examined what she claims as 
encouraging results. We have seen that all real advances are en- 
joyed as well under the old regime. We have shown that her 
own figures tell against her a damaging story in other directions. 

In conclusion: If I were compelled to choose between all 
electives and no electives in a college course, I should say, with- 
out a moment's hesitation, no electives. An institution with 



The Collkge Phase of the New Education. ioi 

small classes, which has sufficient funds to sustain a faculty 
of ten able men, and to offer three wisely selected prescribed 
courses, is, for legitimate college work, about as well off without 
electives as with them, even for the upper classes. Such electives 
are desirable, when the institution can afford them, without crip- 
pling resources needed for regular requirements, or without seri- 
ously increasing the expenses of the student. 

In one way Harvard is doing great damage to strictly college 
education throughout the United States. She is most zealously 
using the vast influence which she, as the oldest and most famous 
seat of learning in the republic, has been acquiring for two hun- 
dred and fifty years, to make sixty millions of people believe, that 
any college which does not substitute optionalism for prescription 
is conducted on false principles, and that any college which can 
not furnish the most abundant electives, from matriculation to 
graduation, is offering a meager and comparatively worthless col- 
lege education. I have no fear, however, that she will accomplish the 
universal revolution which she intends. The great majority of our 
colleges will suffer seriously for a season. They will experiment 
with optionals, and strain themselves to provide electives, for the 
sake of attracting patronage and asserting their relative impor- 
tance. In so doing they will add greatly to the cost, without add- 
ing greatly to the value of the college course. But I be- 
lieve that the strong common-sense of the American peo- 
ple will finally come to the rescue, will assert that a boy is not 
a man, that there is a fundamental difference between the college 
method and the university method, and that the college method 
is the method for the boy, the university method the method for 
the man. 



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